Eric Goldman writes: In January, Zappos (part of $AMZN) announced a massive data security breach affecting 24 million consumers. As typically happens in these situations, plaintiffs’ class action lawyers swarmed over Zappos for the breach, filing dozens of lawsuits. Zappos tried to send the lawsuits to arbitration based on an arbitration clause in its user agreement. Recently,…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Industry piles on to support Wyndham’s motion to dismiss FTC complaint
This might be a good time to follow up on my previous coverage of the FTC complaint against Wyndham, and Wyndham’s motion to dismiss. As I noted previously, this is the first time that the FTC has faced an actual legal challenge to its authority to bring an action over data security. Since my last…
AU: 23,000 Australians had their tax file numbers compromised last year
For perspective, given the massive tax refund fraud/ID theft in the U.S. Isabelle Oderberg reports: Over 23,300 Australians had their tax file number compromised in the 2012 financial year, according to data from the Australian Taxation Office, up from 22,000 last year. “Certainly, the delay in many tax refunds is because they have to go…
Maryland cyberdefenses lacking, finds residents’ info may be at risk – Audit
Aaron C. Davis reports some of the findings from an audit of Maryland’s Department of Information Technology and some other state agencies: … state agencies have not consistently or adequately protected personal identifiable information, such as residents’ Social Security numbers. They also have not consistently reported data breaches, according to the state’s nonpartisan Department of…
Average insurance cost per data breach rises to $3.7M: Study
Mike Tsikoudakis reports: The average insurance cost per data breach incident increased sharply from $2.4 million in 2010 to $3.7 million in 2011, according to a new NetDiligence study released Tuesday. Based on insurance claims that were submitted in 2011 for incidents that occurred from 2009 to 2011, the average number of records exposed decreased…
The City of Tulsa’s costly screw-up
The saga of the City of Tulsa hack-that-wasn’t-a-hack fascinates me and would be funny if it wasn’t such a costly foul-up. While the city’s IT manager is on paid administrative leave, Ian Silver of Fox23 provides some additional details , most notably: To their credit, the city had hired SecurityMetrics 18 months ago to periodically…