Attorney General William Sorrell filed a complaint and proposed settlement Friday with Health Net, Inc., and Health Net of the Northeast, Inc., regarding the health insurance company’s loss of an unencrypted portable hard drive containing protected health information. The complaint alleges violations of HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), Vermont’s Security Breach Notice Act, and…
Category: Breach Incidents
Sydney Festival in privacy glitch
Luke Hopewell reports: Organisers behind the annual Sydney Festival have inadvertently committed a privacy breach by sending an email to users that displayed the contents of its mailing list. The email contains the email addresses of around 130 people who registered for a festival mailing list, some from government departments, Sony Music, JP Morgan and…
NSW Privacy Commissioner investigates University of Sydney data breach
Ben Grubb reports: NSW acting privacy commissioner John McAteer today said that his office was “examining” a data breach through which the detailed records of thousands of University of Sydney students past and present were leaked. The records were being stored online where they could be downloaded easily and read via an internet connection. It…
Ingenix discovers it may have been exposing health service providers’ SSNs for up to 5 years
This is one of those breaches where I really don’t blame the company, which in this case is Minnesota-based Ingenix. Ingenix provides web-based lookups so that patients can find providers in their area covered by their health plan. The provider data Ingenix uses is provided by the health plans or preferred provider plans themselves. Ingenix…
Swiss banker who gave WikiLeaks tax evader files escapes jail time for breaking bank secrecy laws
Frank Jordans of Associated Press reports: A Swiss banker who claims to have handed WikiLeaks details of rich tax evaders has been found guilty of coercion and breaking Switzerland’s strict banking secrecy laws. A judge at Zurich’s Regional Court has sentenced Rudolf Elmer to a fine of over 6,000 Swiss francs ($6,000). Elmer claimed at…
AT&T iPad hackers’ chats were turned in by secret source
Robert McMillan reports: Rhe government’s case against two men charged with hacking into AT&T’s website to steal e-mail addresses from about 120,000 iPad users got a boost last year when a confidential source handed over 150 pages of chat logs between the two and other members of their hacking group. Excerpts from the logs, published…