Bill Curry reports:
An amateur hacker attacked two government servers at Agriculture Canada, putting at risk about 60,000 personal-data records of Canadian farmers, according to the Privacy Commissioner’s annual report.
The report lists various privacy breaches that came to the Commissioner’s attention over the past year, but Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said she was at a loss to explain why several of the highlighted incidents involved the federal agriculture department.
The attack occurred in September, 2008, and the hacker installed e-mailing software on government servers. The report said the attack was traced back to a “script kiddie,” a term describing an amateur hacker who installs malicious software for kicks.
Read more in The Globe and Mail.