After being outed by a Massachusetts judge who felt that the retailer should have disclosed the incident in 2008, Wet Seal subsequently issued a statement acknowledging that they had a security breach that involved the hacking ring led by Albert Gonzalez. According to Wet Seal’s statement: In May 2008, we became aware that a criminal…
Author: Dissent
Organizations Rarely Report Breaches to Law Enforcement
Kelly Jackson Higgins has a column on why organizations do not rush to share information with the FBI and why the FBI wants them to share more: …. the FBI will protect victim organization’s privacy, data, and will share what information it can from its investigation, he said, rather than continue with the mostly one-way…
OIG Audit: The DOJ’s efforts to combat identity theft
Although identity theft is a significant public concern, a new audit report by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General indicates that it has become less of a priority instead of more of one over the past few years. Noting that the President’s Identity Theft Task Force (created in May 2006 by…
Barnet Council loses thousands of children’s personal files
From an editorial in Ham&High in the UK: Personal details of 9,000 school pupils in Barnet have been stolen from the home of a council employee, bosses have announced. In breach of the council’s policy the employee took home 20 unauthorised and unencrypted CDs and memory sticks full of the children’s details including names, dates…
Letters tip off patients
Pierrette J. Shields reports: Boulder Community Hospital officials are investigating anonymous letters sent to patients of a Lafayette clinic along with medical records that the sender claims were pulled from the trash. A Longmont woman told the Times-Call she received the anonymous letter Monday with a page from her son’s medical records that included private…
(update) ECMC breach due to failure to adhere to policies
Small note for those who look for official disclosure and notification letters: the notification sent by the Educational Credit Management Corp (ECMC) to New Hampshire with a copy of its notification to those affected is now available online (pdf). In other news on the breach, Kelly Jackson Higgins of Dark Reading points out that the…