John O’Connor of the Associated Press reports that AP obtained a memo suggesting that an Illinois state employee downloading music to a laptop computer was responsible for inadvertently sharing sensitive Illinois Department on Aging information such as employees’ Social Security numbers. About 170 employees may have been affected.
Category: Exposure
UK: Barclaycard apologises to widow for 317-strong letter error
Gill Montia of Banking Times reports: Barclaycard has had to apologise to a Mrs Sandra Grant of Erith in Kent, after sending her 317 letters in one day. The recently widowed 55-year-old said it took her all morning to open the post, which contained details of various Barclaycard customers, including account numbers, names and amounts…
UK: Anonymity proves grey area for IDScan
John Ozimek of The Register reports: Security software provider IDScan has been left red-faced after a page of supposedly anonymous details of ID cheats on its website turned out not to have been anonymised after all. […] To protect the anonymity of the individuals depicted, IDScan has helpfully left their photos visible but greyed out…
TX: TWU shuts down, secures computer system after student finds way to access adviser reports
Candace Carlisle of the Denton Record-Chronicle reports that a student at Texas Woman’s University discovered that he could access the uni’s Degree Audit Report System. DARS does not contain student identifiers, but it does contain a copy of students’ names, courses, and grades. Exposure of such information may be a FERPA violation, but based on…
VA: Personnel records from trucking company found in dumpster
Eric Harryman of WAVY reports that eight boxes with thousands of personnel records from Warrior Xpress trucking company were left in a dumpster. The documents included medical records, tax forms, voided checks and copied credit cards. Warrior Xpress had been bought by Celadon Trucking, who told WAVY, “For those who met our hiring criteria, we…
Ca: Privacy breach in bank slip-up
It was one of those small breaches that many chronologies or industry reports do not include, but the fact that it made the media offers some hope that people continue to be concerned over breaches: Joanne Hatherly of The Times Colonist reports that when a customer was considering opening an account at an RBC Royal…