Anna Cox reports that more than 1 million customers may have had their information exposed for years by an improperly secured city web site: The City of Joburg has apologised for the inconvenience caused by the security glitch that exposed customer rates and services invoices to fraudsters. The e-statement site had to be shut down…
Category: Government Sector
Department of Energy Hacked Again
Rachel King reports: The United States Department of Energy notified employees via an email Wednesday that hackers gained personal information, such as names and social security numbers, of 14,000 current and former agency employees as the result of a hack that occurred in late July. This is the second attack this year that involved a…
Alabama state employee sentenced for role in tax refund fraud scheme
Chequlia Motley of Montgomery, Ala., was sentenced Tuesday to serve 36 months in prison for conspiracy and aggravated identity theft, announced Assistant Attorney General Kathryn Keneally of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama George L. Beck Jr. Motley pleaded guilty to those charges in May 2013. According…
Privacy watchdog fines Greece’s Finance Ministry for data protection failure
Associated Press reports that Greece’s Finance Ministry has been fined €150,000 ($200,000) by the privacy watchdog for allegedly failing to protect data on millions of taxpayers. The data ended up in the hands of private companies, or in some cases, in the hands of data thieves. The Data Protection Authority said Friday the ministry hadn’t taken…
Serious Farce Office: SFO suffers biggest-ever criminal data breach
James Moore reports: The Serious Fraud Office is engulfed by a new scandal after it admitted that thousands of pages of evidence as well as tapes and data files from 58 separate sources were sent back to the wrong owner. The enormous volume of evidence related to its long-running corruption investigation into defence giant BAE…
UK: Council’s data blunder branded ‘sloppy’ by FoI expert
Another case where a FOI (freedom of information) response exposed too much: A data blunder which saw the council release sensitive staff information has been branded ‘sloppy and embarrassing’ by the recipient. Roger Gill originally submitted a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to Horsham District Council after receiving no response to a complaint about Acorn…