Associated Press reports: A $10 billion-a-year effort to protect sensitive government data, from military secrets to Social Security numbers, is struggling to keep pace with an increasing number of cyberattacks and is unwittingly being undermined by federal employees and contractors. Workers scattered across more than a dozen agencies, from the Defense and Education departments to…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
In wake of massive breach, Vendini Joins PCI Security Standards Council
So it seems live event ticketing service Vendini sent out a press release about how they’ve joined the PCI Security Council and how they’ve hired someone new to innovate security techniques. I’d have been more impressed if they had done that before their massive breach – or at least acknowledged that their new involvement and commitment is…
Goldilocks and the three data breach estimates
Estimate in haste, repent in leisure? Over on PHIprivacy.net, I recently reported on a breach in Jersey City involving patient records stolen from a shed behind a doctor’s office. The first media report, on NJ.com, said Dr. Nisar A. Quraishi told police that 40,000 patients’ records had been stolen. At 40,000, that incident would qualify as the second largest breach…
Should the FTC Be Regulating Privacy and Data Security?
Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog write: This past Tuesday the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against AT&T for allegedly throttling the Internet of its customers even though they paid for unlimited data plans. This complaint was surprising for many, who thought the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was the agency that handled such telecommunications issues. Is…
New GDPR Data Breach Notification Agreement Sparks Debate
Neil Ford writes: The slow, stately progress of European data protection law continues: last month in Luxembourg, ministers in the Justice and Home Affairs Committee of the EU’s Council of Ministers reached partial agreement on reforms to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). (The GDPR, you’ll remember, will replace the EU Data Protection Directive with a…
68% of Healthcare Data Breaches Due to Device Loss or Theft, Not Hacking
Jasmine Pennic reports: 68 percent of all healthcare data breaches since 2010 are due to device theft or loss, according to the 2014 Healthcare Breach Report from Bitglass. Despite the recent headlines of hacker attacks to hospitals, only 23 percent of healthcare data breaches were a result of cybercriminals compromising networks and exfiltrating data. The findings come…