Noah Buhayar of Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports another insurance company has suffered a breach: Oak River Insurance Co., a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (A), asked clients to guard against identity theft after an employee released some of their personal information. The data are tied to about 2,700 workers’ compensation claimants who had spinal surgery…
Category: Business Sector
Numbers from Nationwide Insurance breach dribble out (update7)
I wish companies would heed my advice and get the bad news out at all once instead of staying in the news cycle as each new revelation hits the media. We are starting to get numbers on the hack of Nationwide Insurance and Allied Insurance that I reported here on November 17: Georgia reports 28,467…
Jail Looms for Man Who Revealed AT&T Leaked iPad User E-Mails (updated)
Tom Simonite reports: AT&T screwed up in 2010, serving up the e-mail addresses of over 110,000 of its iPad 3G customers online for anyone to find. But today Andrew Auernheimer, an online activist who pointed out AT&T’s blunder to Gawker Media, which went on to publicize the breach of private information, is the one in federal…
Data Breach Class Action against Popular Video Game Developer Dismissed for Failure to Plead Adequate Damages
An update on the Valve/Steam breach… Alan Pate writes: In a ruling this past Wednesday, November 14th, a Federal Judge in the Western District of Washington dismissed a class action against video game developer Valve Corporation. The class action stemmed from a November 6th, 2011 data breach of Valve’s popular online video game distribution platform,…
Breach notification done right? (Nationwide hack, updated)
I spend a lot of time criticizing breach notifications, so it’s nice when I can occasionally point to a positive example. Without considering whether the breach could have been prevented, consider this notification letter from Nationwide Insurance, dated November 16: We want to make you aware that a portion of our computer network was criminally…
Delayed breach notification letter from law firm raises more questions than it answers (updated)
Here’s another notification letter submitted to the California Attorney General’s Office that left me scratching my head. It’s from the law firm of Sprechman & Associates, P.A. in Miami, a firm that specializes in collections. My comments and questions are inserted in italics: Dear XXXXXX: I am writing to advise you that your personally identifiable information…