CBC News reports: P.E.I.’s information and privacy commissioner is recommending changes to prevent breaches at the Workers Compensation Board after 47 breaches to personal privacy were reported in a four-year period. Privacy Commissioner Karen Rose started investigating after a WCB client complained in 2010 some of his medical information was mailed to an unrelated third…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
INFORMATION SECURITY: Department of Education and Other Federal Agencies Need to Better Implement Controls – GAO
From a newly released GAO report: Cyber-based risks to federal systems and information can come from unintentional threats, such as natural disasters, software coding errors, and poorly trained or careless employees, or intentional threats, such as disgruntled insiders, hackers, or hostile nations. These threat sources may exploit vulnerabilities in agencies’ systems and networks to steal…
INFORMATION SECURITY: Federal Agencies Need to Better Protect Sensitive Data – GAO
From a newly released GAO report: Federal systems face an evolving array of cyber-based threats. These threats can be unintentional—for example, from software coding errors or the actions of careless or poorly trained employees; or intentional—targeted or untargeted attacks from criminals, hackers, adversarial nations, terrorists, disgruntled employees or other organizational insiders, among others. These concerns…
FL: Audit finds Tampa put city workers at risk of ID theft
Christopher O’Donnell reports: The city broke federal law and put some workers at risk of identity theft by including their Social Security numbers on child support and other garnishment checks, a city audit found. The audit of the city’s Accounts Payable department showed Social Security numbers were printed on payment checks sent to banks, creditors…
#ParisAttacks — Anonymous declares War on Daesh: ‘We will Hunt you Down!’
Swati Khandelwal reports: Following the bloody terror attacks in Paris where over 130 people were killed, the hacktivist collective Anonymous has declared total war against the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). Anonymous released a video message, posted in French, on YouTube Sunday announcing the beginning of #OpParis, a coordinated campaign to hunt down ISIS’s social media channels and every single…
Medical data, staff creds exposed as scores of apps bork the backend
Darren Pauli reports: And still we fail to learn: a quintet of researchers has found that the bad practice of writing keys into code persists among some of the world’s most popular Android and iOS applications. The researchers say the hard-coded credentials can be easily extracted to gain access and manipulate millions of sensitive individual…