Sarah Schmidt of Canwest News Service reports that a Staples Business Depot store in Ottawa sold a returned computer hard-drive on clearance that contained hundreds of personal files on it. Although businesses have responsibility to protect information under PIPEDA, Staples has a warning on all of its receipts that says, “Customers are responsible for the…
Category: Exposure
CA: Security breach at SCC inspires shredding changes
Sarah Rohrs reports that a computer printout containing the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of students in the 2008 graduating class of Solano Community College accidentally got mixed in with scrap paper used in a mathematics lab. The college believes it recovered all of the pages.
UK: Medical records from York Hospital found in street
Nicola Fifield of The Press reports that a document containing personal and medical information on 19 patients at York Hospital was found on a sidewalk nearly two miles from the hospital. As an example of how troubling such breaches can be, one notation indicated that a named patient has HIV and syphilis.
TX: Medical Records Found Flying Around Parking Lot
MSNBC has a small item from NBCDFW.com that a Dallas man found a box full of medical records that included Social Security numbers in a parking lot after someone reportedly broke into a doctor’s storage unit. Neither the name of the doctor nor the name of the storage facility were indicated in the news story.
Aussie stumbles on 19,000 exposed credit card numbers
Ry Crozier of iTnews reports: A defunct payment gateway has exposed as many as 19,000 credit card numbers, including up to 60 Australian numbers. The discovery by a local IT industry worker was made by mistake and appears to be caused by a known issue with the Google search engine, in which the pages of…
ID theft feared as files found in street in East New York, Brooklyn
I know that most of the world is more concerned with electronic data breaches than paper breaches, but I’ve always been as concerned, and in some cases, more concerned, about paper breaches. Here’s another example from New York, reported by Veronika Belenkaya of the NY Daily News: Dozens of confidential files with city public housing…