As a follow-up to a Nova Scotia privacy breach previously noted on this site, The Chronicle Herald has an update with a government and police smackdown by EFF. Aaron Beswick explains:
The Nova Scotia government received a cyber-security award this week.
But it wasn’t a good one.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online non-profit group championing privacy, free expression and innovation, handed the government and police in Halifax the 2019 What the Swat? award.
The award stems from the arrest of a 19-year-old Halifax man in April for accessing 7,000 documents from the province’s freedom of information website. Data accessed included birth dates, social insurance numbers, addresses and government-services client information.
Police charged the man with unauthorized use of a computer.
“The Canadian teen had just downloaded a host of public records from openly available URLs on a government website,” reads the award notification.
“At the heart of the ordeal was some seriously terrible security practices by Nova Scotia officials.”
Read more on The Chronicle Herald. And see EFF’s award page on this one, here.