A useful reminder to take a breath after a mistake lest you compound your problems: Electricals retailer Comet faces an investigation by the data protection watchdog after it accidentally sold a TV set on its website for 2p, and then revealed the email addresses of more than 500 people who took advantage of the bargain…
Category: Breach Incidents
Thursday head-scratcher: A cybercriminal who registers with MasterCard?
Monadnock Community Bank reported a breach to the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office involving one of their customers, a New Hampshire resident. According to the bank’s notification of September 23, the customer reported six fraudulent transactions on his/her MasterMoney debit card involving Sharaf Travel in Dubai, UAE. When the bank tried to get the funds…
Two More Courts Close the Doors on Data Breach Plaintiffs
Venkat Balasubramani discusses two recent court decisions that turned data breach plaintiffs away. The first case is the Hannaford case, discussed previously on this blog, but I was surprised to learn that the Providence Health System breach finally was decided: Paul v. Providence Health System-Oregon, (Ore. Ct. App. Oct. 6, 2010): this case involved the…
Cancer researcher fights UNC demotion over data breach (updated)
Gregory Childress reports that a data breach had significant consequences for a researcher. Because I don’t recall ever seeing such consequences before, I think this is pretty newsworthy: A UNC cancer researcher is fighting a demotion and pay cut she received after a security breach in the medical study she directs. Bonnie Yankaskas, a professor in…
Hacked D.C. online voting system stored login and encryption key on server
Kim Zetter writes: An internet-based voting system that was hacked last week by researchers at the University of Michigan stored its database username, password and encryption key on a server open to attack. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the university, has detailed the vulnerabilities and hacking techniques his students used to completely control the system…
Employee of Akamai Technologies charged with wire fraud in spying sting
Another reminder about insiders, even though in this case, no confidential data was actually compromised because a would-be spy delivered the information to an undercover federal agent. From the press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts, a case first reported by Elizabeth Heichler on Computerworld: An employee of a high technology company headquartered…