Bill Cotterell reports from Florida: A lawmaker Thursday demanded to know how a $248-million personnel contract got renewed with a Convergys operation recently sold to a British firm. The Department of Management Services assured Sen. David Aronberg that security of state employee data, and operation of Tallahassee and Jacksonville service centers, will continue unchanged. Aronberg,…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Audit: Some sensitive data at ISU not adequately secured
Kurt Erickson reports: State auditors say lax security at Illinois State University could have allowed university credit card accounts, personal health information and employee Social Security numbers to get into the wrong hands. In a report on the university’s financial practices for the year ending in June 2009, Illinois Auditor General Bill Holland said auditors…
Wickenburg Unified School District struggles to secure sensitive student data
Pat Kossan reports that data security in the Wickenburg Unified School District was found seriously lacking in a state audit: Wickenburg Unified School District has not secured its computer system containing sensitive student data, including student addresses, birth dates and Social Security numbers, state auditors found. Staffers from the Arizona Office of the Auditor General…
Analyst Study Shows Employees Continue to Put Data at Risk
From the press release, results of the annual “Human Factor in Laptop Encryption” study by Absolute Software and the Ponemon Institute: This year’s expanded study was conducted in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany and Sweden, in addition to the United States. The study found that 15% of German and 13% Swedish business managers have…
Voluntary Breach Disclosure Rare But Valuable
Kelly Jackson Higgins writes: Google’s and Adobe’s disclosure in January that they had been hit by the same wave of targeted attacks were rare voluntary revelations, the likes of which may never be seen again: Most companies won’t disclose an attack unless required to by law or regulations. But security experts and forensics investigators say…
Fiserv to Banks: Stay on Outdated Adobe Reader
Brian Krebs reveals that Fiserv, a “Fortune 500 company that provides bank transaction processing services and software to more than 16,000 clients worldwide,” is urging customers not to use the most updated version of Adobe Reader. In a notice dated February 18, 2010 on a part of its web site available to security and IT…