From BBC: An appeal hearing has overturned a £250,000 fine for Scottish Borders Council over data protection failings. The Information Commissioner’s Office issued the Monetary Penalty Notice (MPN) in September last year. SBC paid the fine to get a 20% discount but lodged an appeal saying the scale of it was “very disappointing”. A four-day…
Category: Government Sector
NASA ARC Memo: Breach of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) – July 1, 2013
Status Report Source: Ames Research Center Subject: Breach of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) – July 1, 2013 From: ARC-HR Date: July 10, 2013 On Monday July 1, 2013 an email message was sent to all Civil Servants titled “Supreme Court Decision on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and Federal Employee Benefits.” The email was…
NY: State worker sent 17,743 Medicaid records to personal account
Jon Campbell reports: A state employee was placed on leave after emailing thousands of private Medicaid records to his personal email account, state Medicaid Inspector General James Cox announced today. The security breach happened on Oct. 12 of last year, when the employee — who worked for Cox’s office — sent 17,743 records to the…
TX: Personal info of 16,000 Harris County employees’ discovered in electronic files in Vietnam
Brian Collister reports that the personal information of approximately 16,000 former and current Harris County employees was found in two electronic files in Vietnam. The information included names, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth. One of the files was from 2005 and another was from 2007, both before the county changed its system to…
Oops. Japanese Government Shares Internal E-Mails on Google
Akiko Fujita reports: You may want to think twice the next time you skip over those privacy settings online. Government ministries in Japan are playing damage control after accidentally leaking internal emails on Google Groups, unaware that the site’s default settings would make their private conversations public. A spokesman with the Ministry of Environment tells…
California Dept. of Consumer Affairs has a breach, but doesn’t notify those affected for 6 months?
Ouch. The California Department of Consumer Affairs – Bureau of Automotive Repair (“BAR”) learned that a service provider had a network intrusion breach that gave someone access to bank account numbers and bank routing numbers belonging to the Smog Check stations licensed by the BAR. The breach reportedly occurred between May 2012 and March 2013,…