A Palm Beach County resident pled guilty for his participation in a stolen identity tax refund fraud conspiracy involving students and other individuals’ personal identifying information (PII). Oniel Winston Scarlett, 28, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, to retain and conceal monies stolen from the United States, and to commit identity…
Category: Education Sector
Abingdon Avon employee arrested a month after a data breach
There’s a follow-up to an investigation noted previously on this site. KWQC reports that the he Abingdon-Avon School District’s IT Director has been arrested just a month after the district revealed it was investigating an employee for a data breach impacting student grades and grade point averages (GPAs). Court records show Mark L. Rodgers is charged with…
Ca: Personal information in 100,000 IT requests compromised in Simon Fraser University database misconfiguration
Corneilia Naylor reports that Simon Fraser University has self-disclosed that they left a lot of personal information on an unsecured database. Good for them for discovering it and disclosing it, although of course we wish it had never happened or had been discovered sooner. On Jan. 27, 2016, SFU IT services inadvertently copied incidents, inquiries and…
WVSU email accounts ‘compromised’ earlier this year
Jake Jarvis reports: Two-dozen student email addresses at West Virginia State University were “compromised” earlier this year, but the students weren’t told that someone else might have gotten into their accounts. WVSU’s information technology department received a list in March of about 1,600 email addresses. The person who sent the list said they had been…
Equifax service remains mum about client reports of tax refund fraud
Back in April, DataBreaches.net noted that Stanford University was notifying its employees about tax refund fraud. The fraud appeared to result from perpetrators downloading employees’ W-2 information from the university’s vendor, W-2 Express, and then using the info to file fraudulent returns. W-2 information typically includes an employee’s name and address, their wage and salary information, as well…
Almost 3 years after malware compromise, U. Conn notifies some of those affected
No good news ever begins this way: We are writing to inform you of a data security-related incident that may have involved your personal information. On March 9, 2015, Information Technology (IT) staff in the School of Engineering detected that malicious software, or “malware,” had been placed on a number of servers that are part…