John Oates reports on another black eye for HMRC: Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs apologised today for sending out private information to 50,000 tax credit recipients. One taxpayer who contacted The Register said: “We received our tax credit notice with our National Insurance details but on the back were two strangers’ work, childcare and pay…
Category: Government Sector
HMRC mails wrong private info to
PA: 2 Get Prison for Stealing ID’s of DUI Offenders
As a follow-up to a case previously reported here, Myles Snyder reports: Two Lancaster men will spend less than two years in prison for using the identities of drunken driving offenders in a identity theft scheme. John B. Spencer III, 29, was sentenced in federal court Wednesday to 21 months imprisonment followed by three years…
Ca: Shockingly easy to obtain confidential information
It seems you don’t need “friends in high places” to open doors for you in Saskatchewan. How about a humble data entry clerk? That’s apparently all it took for the Teamsters Union to obtain confidential personal information from the SGI [Saskatchewan Government Insurance] database which it then used to write to the home addresses of…
UPDATE: Missing hard drive recovered
Note: This May 17 press release from the Arkansas National Guard updates a breach previously covered on DataBreaches.net (here and here): CAMP JOSEPH T. ROBINSON, Ark. — The external hard drive containing personal information on over 32,000 current and former Arkansas Guardsmen that was reported missing on February 22 has now been recovered and destroyed….
Dutch Public Transportation Website Leaks Private Passenger Information
Lucian Constantin reports: A government-run website promoting the OV-chipkaart smart card, which is currently being introduced in public transportation across The Netherlands, has been found leaking sensitive private information on over 168,000 passengers. A grey-hat hacker proved that he could access the name, address, birth date, phone number or e-mail for anyone in the database,…
Data stolen from NADRA office in Karachi
From the that’s-all-they-wrote dept: LAHORE: Unidentified men broke into the premises of the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) office at the Shah Faisal Colony in Karachi and stole some very important data, a private television channel reported on Monday. According to the channel, the thieves had sneaked into the NADRA office through a window…