Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz reports: User names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other information belonging to independent college consultants who used CollegePlannerPro from 2015 to 2017 were freely available to anyone on web servers used by the software company. An anonymous tip sent to The Chronicle on Thursday pointed out a hyperlink that anyone could use to…
Category: Exposure
Former Suncoast Hospital patients worried about abandoned medical records
Peter Bernard reports: Patients of the former Suncoast Hospital are worried bad guys may have their private information. A security guard is watching the decaying, old medical center. But it might be too late to keep personal medical records from being stolen. “My wife had three of the kids out there. And she also had cataract surgery at…
Concerns teen being ‘railroaded’ in privacy breach to cover government slip
Jon Tattrie reports: Software and privacy experts say an embarrassed Nova Scotia government seems to be seeking a scapegoat, following Halifax police’s quick arrest of a 19-year-old man for accessing private documents publicly visible on a provincial website. The teenager is charged with unauthorized use of a computer, which carries a prison term of up to 10 years. “In order to break…
Personal information of 1 million potential college applicants ‘exposed inadvertently’
Emily Tate reports that a vendor in the higher education space exposed more than 1 million potential college applicants’ information due to a misconfigured rsync backup: The data — which included names, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, high school graduation years and, in a few cases, dates of birth and Social Security numbers —…
Nova Scotia government portal reportedly breached; under investigation
CBC News in Canada reports: Halifax police have detained a person after a breach of the Nova Scotia government’s freedom-of-information website that included access to personal information. More than 7,000 documents were accessed. About four per cent were determined to have “highly sensitive personal information,” according to government officials. They said the number of Nova Scotians affected is “in…
Mistake in Some Google Groups Permissions Left Sensitive Info Accessible to Boston College community
Steven Everett and Connor Murphy report: Until December 2017, Google Groups containing hundreds of University communications and associated documents with restricted, confidential, or otherwise sensitive information had misconfigured permission settings such that anyone who could access the Boston College G Suite—known formally as Google Apps—could view them, a Heights investigation found. The Heights notified the…