From the ICO: Employees could face a criminal prosecution if they access or share personal data without a valid reason, the Information Commissioner’s Office has warned. The warning came after Birmingham Magistrates’ Court fined two workers in separate cases for breaching data protection laws. Faye Caughey, 32, of Ringswood Road, Solihull was employed at the…
Category: Business Sector
NC: Man accused of trying to extort former employer by releasing customers’ private information
WSOCTV reports: A man accused of trying to extort his former employer by threatening to release thousands of people’s personal and private information stood before a federal court judge for the first time Monday morning. The government said Matthew Moebius worked for a Statesville company for 13 years and had access to customers’ information. Court papers…
Education and Science Giant Elsevier Left Users’ Passwords Exposed Online
Joseph Cox reports: Elsevier, the company behind scientific journals such as The Lancet, left a server open to the public internet, exposing user email addresses and passwords. The impacted users include people from universities and educational institutions from across the world. It’s not entirely clear how long the server was exposed or how many accounts…
Boxes of documents including possible personal tax information showed up at a Marshall Co. recycling center, investigation underway
Laura Christmas reports from Alabama: Monday morning when employees came to work at a Marshall County recycling center, they found boxes of documents that included people’s personal information in what looked like personal tax documents. Some of the papers had a company name listed: Professional Tax & Accounting, which has three offices in Birmingham, Jasper,…
Here’s What It’s Like to Accidentally Expose the Data of 230M People
Andy Greenberg reports: Steve Hardigree hadn’t even gotten to the office yet, and his day was already a waking nightmare. As he Googled his company’s name that morning last June, Hardigree found a growing list of headlines pointing to the 10-person marketing firm he’d founded three years earlier, Exactis, as the source of a leak…
Round 4: Hacker returns and puts 26Mil user records for sale on the Dark Web
Catalin Cimpanu reports: A hacker who has previously put up for sale over 840 million user records in the past month, has returned with a fourth round of hacked data that he’s selling on a dark web marketplace. This time, the hacker has put up for sale the data of six companies, totaling 26.42 million…