Associated Press reports: The personal information of 508 Illinois nursing home residents was inside a stolen briefcase, prompting the state agency overseeing Medicaid to notify the people affected by the breach. The Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services announced the incident Friday. A statement from the department says the briefcase was stolen Aug. 31 from the…
Author: Dissent
Breach on Cornell Computer Exposes Personal Data for Five Days
Akane Otani reports: The personal information of up to 2,000 people was exposed to the public for five days on a computer in Cornell’s athletics department, a University administrator confirmed Thursday. Donald Sevey, director of information systems, said that the University discovered that a file server containing “confidential data” about thousands of people was accessible…
UK: Council guilty of data breach by posting identities online
A council has been accused of putting residents who report litter and graffiti at risk from the perpetrators after the authority breached data protection laws by posting online the identities of those providing the tip-offs. Data protection watchdogs at the Information Commissioner’s Office have deemed that York Council has broken guidelines after it emerged the authority’s online…
Facebook flaw bypasses password protections
Facebook has moved quickly to shut down a loophole which made some accounts accessible without a password. The bug was exposed in a message posted to the Hacker News website. The message contained a search string that, when used on Google, returned a list of links to 1.32 million Facebook accounts. In some cases…
Verizon staff arrested for stealing customer’s nude pics
Iain Thomson reports: Two Verizon staffers are under indictment for allegedly stealing nude photographs from an attractive female customer’s phone and passing them around. According to the gendarmes, the two men worked at a Verizon store in Bartow, Florida, where one, Joshua Stuart, 24, helped a nubile local waitress transfer her data from her old…
NY: First Niagara warns customers of breach
Emily Lenihan reports: This week, First Niagara Bank notified their debit card customers that MasterCard had detected a security breach in its merchant network that could put some accounts at risk. As a result, the bank will cancel affected debit cards as of November 13, and issue new ones. Read more on WIVB. As usual,…