Jack Clark reports: The European Space Agency has confirmed that a hacker entered its FTP servers and took sensitive data, including hundreds of passwords. The data breach exposed more than 200 usernames, passwords and email addresses, as well as server logs, the agency said on Tuesday. A Romanian hacker named ‘TinKode’ has claimed responsibility for…
Category: Government Sector
Ca: Software glitch kills electronic stubs for federal workers’ paycheques
Dean Beebe reports: A mysterious security breach has shut down the federal government’s online pay system, affecting some 320,000 public servants. The system was pulled offline for “urgent” repairs on April 4 after officials discovered the privacy of eight account-holders had been breached. Pay is still being deposited as scheduled in employees’ bank accounts. But…
NZ: Policeman’s leak of data breached privacy law
Jared Savage reports: A police officer who leaked secret information to his wife in a bid to win a custody battle with her ex-husband also breached privacy law, a watchdog has ruled. The Herald revealed in February that an internal police investigation found Senior Constable Terry Beatson used the police National Intelligence Application (NIA) to…
Comptroller offers discount on credit monitoring after data breach
I read the following news story by Dan Wallach and thought, “Are you kidding me?!” The Texas Comptroller’s office has arranged for individuals affected by an inadvertent exposure of personal data to receive a 70 percent discount on one year of credit monitoring to alert them if their information is misused. On Monday, the comptroller’s office…
SSA exposed SSNs, names, birth dates for 36,000 people, IG says
From the are-you-absolutely-sure-you’re-not-dead dept. Alice Lipowicz reports: The Social Security Administration publicly made available the names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information on more than 36,000 people from May 2007 to April 2010 despite being warned about the privacy risks, according to a report from SSA’s Office of the Inspector General….
Texas Workforce Commission Information Security Alert
The Texas Workforce Commission issued a security alert following the disclosure of a massive data breach by the Comptroller’s Office: The Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) is concerned about the data security breach at the Office of the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts where the personal information of approximately 2 million Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants was…