Shoshana Walter of The Center for Investigative Reporting has a piece on state agency data breaches, here.
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
CN: Thousands busted in identity theft cases
China Daily reports: Police have busted 4,382 cases of personal information theft, involving 5 billion pieces ofstolen information, People’s Daily reported Thursday. More than 4,000 suspects have been arrested in three national crackdowns launched in 2012 and 2013, and at least 1,200 gangs selling and buying personal information illegally have been destroyed. More than 200 suspects have been punished for providing, selling and obtaining personal information illegally, and the rest face punishment. That’s impressive. I wish I could find the article on People’s Daily, but haven’t been able to track it down yet.
FTC Fires Back In Lawsuit Against Wyndham
Brent Kendall reports: The Federal Trade Commission is offering a strong defense of its powers to police cybersecurity practices against a challenge by Wyndham Worldwide Corp. We wrote about Wyndham’s challenge earlier this month in a case involving attacks by hackers on the hotel chain’s computer systems between 2008 and 2010. The FTC sued Wyndham last year…
Are TerraCom and YourTel the poster children for how NOT to respond to a breach?
Isaac Wolf reports: A month ago, two phone carriers participating in a federal benefit program were alerted that sensitive customer records, including Social Security numbers and bank-account records, were freely posted online. Now, Oklahoma-based TerraCom Inc. and affiliate YourTel America Inc. — the companies that collected the records — say they don’t plan to notify…
Who – if anyone – is responsible for notifying victims of some breaches?
I’ve blogged a number of times about how although law enforcement may uncover breaches or data theft, the victims often do not get notified in a timely fashion – if at all. Here are just a few scenarios where no one may notify people whose data have been stolen: Law enforcement discovers a handwritten list…
Privacy Regulators and the Media Can Make a Bad Data Breach Worse
Larry Keating writes: …. the privacy commissioners hammer down hard on those high profile losses when thousands of records go missing. They want disclosure of the incident and protection for the individuals. The media piles on, always on the hunt for the details, to splay the true extent of the incident for their readers. But…