Tracy Kitten reports: A district court in Illinois has dismissed a consolidated consumer class action lawsuit seeking damages from Michaels Stores Inc. for a card breach the arts and crafts retailer suffered starting in 2013. In a 20-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Elaine Bucklo says the six plaintiffs named in the consolidated suits failed to prove that they suffered “actual economic…
Category: Business Sector
ZA: How to wreck customer relations
Wendy Knowler reports: As corporate mess-ups go, it was pretty big. A “pre-legal credit controller” employed by cellphone service provider Altech Autopage sent an e-mail to 45 of its subscribers earlier this month, many of them former subscribers, telling them to pay up or face the consequences. “We refer to your Altech Autopage account which…
Game Over? Court Approves Sony Settlement In 2011 PSN Data Breach Case
Mike Futter reports: The US District Court for the Southern District of California has preliminarily approved a settlement over the 2011 PlayStation Network data breach, which took the service down for weeks. The cash value of the settlement could be as much as $17.75 million. The settlement includes an offer of a PS3 or PSP game,…
eBay faces class action suit over data breach
John Ribeiro reports that a potential class action lawsuit has been filed against eBay in the wake of its disclosure of a breach: The consumer privacy class action lawsuit, filed Wednesday by Collin Green, a citizen of the state of Louisiana, alleged that the security breach was the result of eBay’s inadequate security in regard…
UK: Online travel services company hit with monetary penalty by ICO following hack
From the Information Commissioner’s Office: Think W3 Limited, an online travel services company, has been served a £150,000 monetary penalty after a serious breach of the Data Protection Act revealed thousands of people’s details to a malicious hacker. The company was hacked in December 2012 after using insecure coding on the website of a subsidiary business, Essential…
Massage school data breach may rub alumni the wrong way
Six hundred and eighty-three Maryland residents who are alumni of the Baltimore School of Massage (BSOM) and Baltimore School of Massage’s Steiner Institute of Esthetics are being offered three years of free credit monitoring, identity protection, and identity theft restoration services following on email error that exposed their information. On June 17, an employee accidentally…