The FBI has an update on a hacking case previously reported on this site: A recently closed California hacking and identity theft case sadly illustrates the misery that can be visited on unsuspecting victims when their personal information is compromised. Between 2011 and 2014, four U.S. citizens who resided in San Diego—but carried out their…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
NYS Data breaches exposed personal information of 9.2M New Yorkers in 2017
WHEC reports: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was in Rochester Thursday to release a new report on data breaches impacting New Yorkers. The attorney general released “Information Exposed: 2017 Data Breaches in New York State,” documenting the record number of data breach notices filed with his office in 2017. In 2017, companies and other entities reported 1,583…
U.S. formally sanctions hacker who leaked Game of Thrones information last year.
I had reported on the indictment last week, but the focus of this piece by Harris puzzled me: The hacker’s name is Behzad Mesri. He was indicted in November of 2017 after he tried to extort $6 million in bitcoin from HBO, operating under the name “little.finger66,” because of course that’s the name he chose. Now, the Justice…
Aadhaar hearing: Supreme Court expresses concerns with data breaches, Aadhaar security and profiling
It sounds like the Supreme Court of India was asking UIDAD some appropriate questions about the Aadhaar system. Asheeta Regidi reports: On Day 22 of the Aadhaar hearing, the CEO of the UIDAI, Ajay Bhushan Pandey, completed his PowerPoint presentation before the Supreme Court and answered the questioned posed by the petitioners. The bench posed…
32 state Attorneys General to Congress: Don’t replace our stronger privacy laws!
Mike Litt writes: A bipartisan group of 32 state Attorneys General, led by Illinois AG Lisa Madigan, sent a joint letter last week to the House Financial Services Committee leadership against the draft (link includes opposition testimony of Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office) “Data Acquisition and Technology Accountability and Security Act” that PIRG has also been opposing. The bill…
More details emerge on The MENTOR Network breach
On March 21, National Mentor Healthcare, doing business as Georgia MENTOR, announced that they were notifying patients of a data breach. A disk with protected health information mailed to them by a software provider was lost in the mail, they explained. They had reportedly discovered the loss on December 21. They did not disclose when…