Radio New Zealand is reporting that Shell Oil says 1,400 of its customers in New Zealand and 4,500 in Australia have had personal details stolen by online hackers. Customers who made online applications for fuel cards were affected and their bank account details may have been stolen. The incident was the second breach reported by…
Author: Dissent
Did The BBC break the law in its botnet report?
So…. did The BBC break the law when it bought and implemented a 22,000-strong botnet as part of its Click news reporting? Nick Farrell of IT Examiner reports that Sophos’ Graeme Cluely suggests that they did because the UK Computer Misuse Act makes it an offense in the United Kingdom to access another person’s computer,…
University of Florida: “starting to have…. quite a reputation”
Nathan Crabbe of The Gainesville Sun reports that in addition to the breaches that recently made the news, UF has had four cases of ID theft resulting from breaches. During a committee meeting of university trustees at which they passed federal rules intended to prevent identity theft, UF Chief Privacy Officer Susan Blair described the…
Bad Bet on Medical Records
Stephen B. Soumerai is a professor of ambulatory care and prevention at Harvard Medical School. Sumit R. Majumdar is an associate professor at the University of Alberta’s Department of Medicine. The following is an op-ed they wrote that appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post: […] The assumption underlying the proposed investment in health IT is that…
Comcast passwords leaked onto the Web
Elinor Mills reports: Thousands of user names and passwords for Comcast customers was removed from document sharing Web site Scribd on Monday, two months after it was posted there. Scribd removed the list of more than 8,000 passwords and user names after being contacted by Brad Stone at The New York Times. Stone wrote that…
Stolen computer at UT contains personal information of students, faculty
A computer stolen from the University of Toledo contained personal information for about 24,000 students and 450 faculty during the 2007-08 and 2008-09 academic years, the university announced Monday. […] The computer was password protected and many of the files were specifically encrypted or individually password protected, he said. The personal data was saved on…