Federal data breaches jumped 19 percent last year, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday. There were roughly 13,000 incidents reported by agencies in 2010 involving unauthorized disclosures of personally identifiable information — last year, that figure shot up to 15,500, Greg Wilshusen, GAO’s director of information security issues, told the Senate subcommittee on government management…
Category: Government Sector
Privacy commissioner ‘deeply disturbed’ by Election Ontario’s handling of voter data
Caroline Alphonso reports: Elections Ontario ignored security measures and went right back to using memory sticks without enabling the encryption software just days after personal information of as many as 2.4 million voters – contained on two USB keys without the necessary safeguards – vanished from one of its warehouses, the province’s privacy commissioner charged….
Ca: Pension data of former city workers stolen
CBC News reports: A stolen hard drive containing pension data for about 800 former City of Ottawa employees will likely never be retrieved, according to the company that was handling the information. New York-based Towers Watson notified the city of the breach after the hard drive disappeared from an office in the Philippines. Towers Watson…
Wrexham Council Email Blunder Reveals Personal Data
Rob Taylor reports: Workers at Wrexham Council were left with red faces yesterday after an email blunder saw personal information of residents being wrongly shared. Hundreds of names and personal e-mail addresses were divulged in a mail out of the authority’s annual tenant survey. One Wrexham.com reader described the error as “the council dropping a…
Utah health officials take Data Breach Security Tour on the road
In the wake of its massive data breach, Utah health officials are doing something I don’t recall ever seeing before – they’re taking breach support on the road to reach out to those affected. Kirsten Stewart reports: Health officials are touring the state, looking to provide one-on-one help to the nearly 800,000 Utahns swept up…
NZ: Winz staff fired over privacy breaches
Jared Savage reports: Ten Work and Income staff members have been sacked after two inquiries into breaches of privacy for beneficiaries. The national review of the Ministry of Social Development was launched last December after an investigation into staff at the Manukau branch office. Seven were dismissed for “appalling” breaches of the code of conduct…