The breach of Heartland Payment Systems grabbed the headlines for much of the year and the entire population of Belize had their birth details stolen when a government employee left a laptop in a car, but what else went on? Your details, my friend, were blowing in the wind Although the number of breaches involving…
Author: Dissent
Philadelphia woman charged in ID theft ring
On December 14, United States Attorney Michael L. Levy announced the filing of a two-count information (pdf) charging Cursheena Patterson, age 24, of Philadelphia, with one count of conspiracy to commit unauthorized access fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft. According to the information, from October through December, 2008, Patterson allegedly obtained the names,…
MA: Data breaches affect million state residents
Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe had an article in today’s paper about the 807 breach notifications the state received over a two-year period. The article referenced some breaches not previously reported in the media: Smaller incidents include the theft in October of three laptop computers from the Springfield accounting firm Moriarty & Primack. The…
WA: Personnel files for Larch workers stolen
Kathie Durbin reports: The Washington Department of Corrections is investigating an incident in which a briefcase full of sensitive personnel records was stolen from the vehicle of a Larch Corrections Center manager early Monday morning. Larch human resources manager Roy Murphy reportedly took the records home over last weekend to review them, then left his…
Twitter bans 370 ‘obvious’ passwords
The micro-blogging service rejects certain passwords when new users sign up if it thinks they are too easy to guess. However, bloggers recently discovered that the list of banned passwords is embedded in the source code of the page itself. Banned terms include commonly chosen generic passwords, such as “123456”, “password” and “password1”, as well…
Official: No computer security breach at Behrend
Gerry Weiss reports: A computer security breach at Pennsylvania State University that may have exposed thousands of Social Security numbers did not disclose personal information of any students, faculty or staff associated with its Erie branch campus, officials here said. Penn State Behrend, which experienced its own computer-related security breach in late January 2009, was…