Darrell R. Santschi reports: Loma Linda University’s dental school has hired a credit monitoring and repair firm to help potential identity theft victims. Kroll Inc. will offer assistance to any of the 10,100 patients whose personal information was contained in three desktop computers stolen from the school the weekend of June 12, university spokesman Dustin…
Author: Dissent
How not to address child ID theft
Over on Emergent Chaos, Adam disagrees with ITRC’s proposed Minors 17-10 Database to reduce child identity theft: …. Unfortunately, this idea is totally and subtly broken. Today, the credit agencies don’t get lists from the SSA. This is a good thing. There’s no authorization under law for them to do so. The fact that they’ve…
MA: Patients’ files from at least four hospitals left at public dump
Liz Kowalczyk reports that four Massachusetts community hospitals – Milford, Holyoke, Carney, and Milton – are investigating how tens of thousands of patient health records, some containing Social Security numbers and sensitive medical diagnoses, ended up in a pile described as 20 feet long by 20 feet wide at Georgetown Transfer Station. Read more of…
Online data breaches plague Metro Nashville
Nate Rau reports: Metro government continues to mistakenly release the sensitive personal information of residents nearly three years after the Social Security numbers of 330,000 Nashville voters were put at risk. Five separate incidents across various city government offices since then have exposed Nashvillians to potential identity theft. The most recent mistake, which involved the…
Tinos diners hit by credit card hackers, Heartland denies breach of its system
Claudia Grisales reports on the breach involving Tino’s Greek Cafe. In previous coverage elsewhere, Heartland Payment Systems had been named as the processor, but the processor denies any responsibility for this breach: “Recent reports of data theft at one Austin-area merchant clearly point to a localized intrusion initiated within the stores, either in their point-of-sale…
Follow-Up: State Department Limits DNA Testing at Cal
Rachel Gross reports: UC Berkeley will go ahead with its controversial DNA testing program for freshmen, but with one key change: students won’t receive personal analyses of the three genes being tested. Instead, professors will lecture on the politics of personalized medicine and the results of the data as a whole. The change was necessitated by…