Counter-terrorism investigators busted an alleged identity theft ring whose members are suspected of bribing Department of Motor Vehicles employees in Inglewood and several states to provide fake documents. Los Angeles police, the FBI, DMV and District Attorney’s Office teamed up to track a Pakistani woman and 13 alleged accomplices, the Los Angeles Times reported on…
Author: Dissent
When is personal data truly de-identified?
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is about to rule whether health care entities will need to notify patients if their de-identified data — patient data that has been stripped of all potential for identifying individuals, which is often used for research and development — is breached. As it stands now, de-identified…
Brighton laptop stolen while IT engineer golfed
Anger is seething among several employees of the city of Brighton (Colorado) whose bank account numbers, social security numbers and addresses may have been compromised by the city’s lead IT engineer. Jeromy King was playing in a charity golf tournament Monday at the Ranch County Club in Westminster when someone apparently took a laptop computer…
Credit industry slow to protect customers from CreditMaster scam
Recent cases in which people have been charged with online fraud for allegedly making purchases with illegally obtained credit card numbers have shed light on the lack of effective measures taken to frustrate the CreditMaster scam used in these incidents, even though the credit card industry was already aware of its existence. The industry is…
Germany adopts stricter data protection law
On July 3, 2009, the German Federal Parliament passed comprehensive amendments to the Federal Data Protection Act (the “Federal Act”). These amendments also passed the Federal Council on July 10, 2009, and the revised law will enter into force on September 1, 2009. The new amendments cover a range of data protection-related issues, including marketing,…
Network Solutions hacked
Hackers have broken into Web servers owned by domain registrar and hosting provider Network Solutions, planting rogue code that resulted in the compromise of more than 573,000 debit and credit card accounts over the past three months, Security Fix has learned. Herndon, Va. based Network Solutions discovered in early June that attackers had hacked into…