Kim Zetter reports: It’s been three weeks since Google announced that it and numerous other U.S. companies were targeted in a recent sophisticated and coordinated hack attack dubbed Operation Aurora. Until now we’ve only known that the attackers got in through a vulnerability in Internet Explorer and that they obtained intellectual property and access to…
Author: Dissent
Why Germany Is Paying Millions in Ransom For Stolen Bank Data
Tristiana Moore reports: The announcement may have caused some super-rich Germans to tremble in their designer shoes. On Tuesday, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaüble said the government has agreed to buy a computer CD from an anonymous informant that contains the stolen bank details of up to 1,500 people suspected of evading German taxes by…
Highmark notifies members of new 'data spill'
Highmark was notifying some 3,700 members on Wednesday that documents containing their names, policy identification and social security numbers were missing, the second such data spill for the region’s dominant health insurer in four months. In January, the company mailed a premium billing statement to Boscov’s Department Store, a client in Reading, according to Highmark….
NM: Credit theft sours winery experience
Ashley Meeks reports: It certainly wasn’t the wine or the bowtie pasta at St. Clair Winery & Bistro that left a bad taste in Bianca Villani’s mouth. It was the call from Visa, informing her that someone in Maryland was trying to put hundreds of dollars of purchases on her card and the cards of…
Possible vendor’s breach may explain some BlackHat attendees being spammed
The following is cross-posted from PogoWasRight.org: Earlier this week, PogoWasRight.org was contacted by an individual who reported that after attending BlackHat 2009, he recently started receiving spam at a unique e-mail address he had created specifically for Breach Security. After receiving spam, he contacted them to change the e-mail address to another unique e-mail address,…
Wigan Council loses the data of 200 disabled residents
A Greater Manchester council has lost details of 200 disabled residents – a year after a previous security blunder. Wigan Council believes a memory stick containing hundreds of confidential details fell out of an employee’s pocket in January…. Town hall chiefs have suspended one member of staff and disciplined another in relation to the latest…