There are e-mail gaffes, and then there are e-mail gaffes that can really be embarrassing. Ben Wright reports: A Muscogee County sheriff’s deputy who emailed personal information of female co-workers using bullet proof vests has been identified. Cpl. Keith Hamilton, the quartermaster in charge of supplies for the Sheriff’s Office, was given a written reprimand…
Category: Government Sector
Credit report lock may hinder ability to sign up for MNsure
Oh good grief… Catherine Richert of Minnesota Public Radio reports: People who have locked their credit reports may have trouble creating an account on the state’s new insurance marketplace, MNsure officials said today. To buy a plan on MNsure, consumers must prove they are who they say they are. To verify an applicant’s information, MNsure…
How Healthcare.gov Could Be Hacked
Dana Liebelson reports: With Healthcare.gov plagued by technical difficulties, the Obama administration is bringing in heavyweight coders and private companies like Verizon to fix the federal health exchange, pronto. But web security experts say the Obamacare tech team should add another pressing cyber issue to its to-do list: eliminating a security flaw that could make sensitive user information, including Social Security…
Update: Dept. of Energy hack affected 7.5x as many individuals as originally reported
Kudos to Mathew J. Schwartz of InformationWeek for following up on the July Dept. of Energy hack. In August, Schwartz reported that the breach involved an outdated version of ColdFusion. In September, he reported that the number affected was not 14,000 – as originally estimated by DOE – but about 53,000. Today, Schwartz calls our…
UK privacy watchdog fines Ministry of Justice for email leaks of prisoner details
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has served the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) with a monetary penalty of £140,000 after a serious data breach led to the details of all of the prisoners serving at HMP Cardiff being emailed to three of the inmates’ families. The breach was only discovered when one of the recipients contacted…
Monterey County computer hack exposes information of 145,000 residents
Jim Johnson reports: Personal information from nearly 145,000 Monterey County residents who received social services assistance was potentially exposed to “overseas” computer hackers who tapped into a county computer in March. The hacked computer included names, Social Security numbers and, in some cases, addresses and dates of birth for 144,493 people who received CalFresh, MediCal,…