The largest number of defendants ever charged in a cyber crime case have been indicted in a multinational investigation conducted in the United States and Egypt that uncovered a sophisticated “phishing” operation that fraudulently collected personal information from thousands of victims that was used to defraud American banks. This morning, authorities in several United States…
Category: Breach Incidents
Researcher refutes phishing account of hijacked Hotmail passwords
Gregg Keizer reports: One researcher isn’t buying Microsoft’s and Google’s explanation that hijacked Hotmail and Gmail passwords were obtained in a massive phishing attack. Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher at San Francisco-based ScanSafe, said it’s more likely that the massive lists — which include approximately 30,000 credentials from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and other…
City admits lapse in data release
Sewell Chan reports: On Tuesday, New York City rolled out the next phase of its NYC BigApps competition, an initiative that will supply local programmers and developers with a stockpile of raw municipal data sets to build applications for the Web and mobile phones. But in what appears to have been an accidental data breach,…
Highmark changes it procedures in wake of BCBS breach
Another lesson learned the hard way? In the aftermath of the theft of a Blue Cross Blue Shield laptop, Highmark, Inc. notified 50,000 doctors that their Social Security numbers or tax ID numbers were on the stolen laptop containing their unencrypted data. A BCBS employee had reportedly breached policy by downloading the unencrypted database to…
TN: 68 Blue Cross Blue Shield hard drives stolen (updated)
Yet another Blue Cross Blue Shield breach in the news this week, although it’s not clear yet whether any PII or PHI are involved (see update below). Joe Legge reports: Monday, Blue Cross Blue Shield workers noticed something missing here at their Eastgate offices. Dozens of computer hard drives weren’t where they were supposed to…
IT analyst at NY Fed Reserve Bank pleads guilty to ID theft scheme
A former employee of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, Curtis L. Wiltshire, pleaded guilty today to one count of bank fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft for having obtained student loans using stolen identities. Kenneth Wiltshire, Curtis Wiltshire’s brother, pleaded guilty to related charges on September 15, 2009. According to the…