Cynthia O’Murchu and Helen Warrell report: The Information Commissioner’s Office is looking into whether companies and individuals broke the law by using private investigators convicted of illegally obtaining private data. Last week the ICO was given 20 files of material by the Serious Organised Crime Agency relating to four private investigators found guilty of “blagging”…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
The State of Standing in Data Breach Litigation
Margaret Dale and David Munkittrick of Proskauer have this article on Law.com about the state of standing in data breach lawsuits.
Other recent breaches that flew under the media radar
State web sites that post breach reports often reveal breaches we didn’t learn about via media coverage. Here are five that I learned about in the past few days: Republic Services reported that a laptop stolen from an employee’s home contained current and former employees’ names and Social Security numbers. The theft occurred in Maricopa…
Advocate Medical Group notifying 4 million patients after burglars snatch unencrypted computers
Advocate Medical Group and its parent, Advent Healthcare, may have just bought themselves a heap of problems. Storing more than 20 year-old personally identifiable data including Social Security numbers on unencrypted computers with less than strong physical security doesn’t bode well for any investigation by HHS or Illinois’s Attorney General. (corrected name on medical group)
Security Clearance Jobs Lost—Paying A Sky High Price For Identity Theft
Sometimes we need a reminder as to the costs of ID theft to the victims. I’m referring to the real victims – not the companies or agencies that were the custodians of our information but failed to protect it adequately, but those whose lives are disrupted in long-lasting ways because there identity information has been…
ICO provides breakdown of data breach reports
The Information Commissioner’s Office has provided an interesting breakdown of breach reports for the first quarter of their fiscal year. The data are provided by incident type and sector, here. Not surprisingly, the largest incident type was “disclosed in error.” The healthcare sector and local government reported the most breaches, but then, not every entity…