Aaron Gould Sheinin reports: An audit of state government’s accounting office found lax computer security that left thousands of state employees’ personal information vulnerable to theft by hackers. No evidence was found that personal and financial information was stolen, according to the audit, released last week. But the report noted that weaknesses in the system…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Unlearned Lessons of ChoicePoint, Four Years Later
Bill Brenner writes: It’s been four years since data broker ChoicePoint acknowledged the data security breach that put it in the middle of a media firestorm and pushed data protection to the top of the infosecurity community’s priority list. Since then, the business world has made plenty of progress hardening its data defenses — thanks…
Data Breaches: Patterns and Their Implications
Luther Martin of Voltage Security has an article on patterns in breaches and how recognizing certain patterns or mathematical likelihoods can help us determine if industry efforts to reduce breaches are actually making an impact. You can read his article on CSO Online.
Biggest Breaches of 2009
Linda McGlasson of BankInfoSecurity.com provides an analysis and commentary, based on ITRC’s statistics for this year. There have been 356 data breaches so far in 2009, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC). And 46 of those breaches have involved financial institutions – up from 34 at this same time last year. In reviewing…
Brits ‘revealing credit card PINs’
More than 8 million Britons have revealed their debit and credit card PIN number to a friend or relative in the last 12 months. That is according to a new survey from LV= home insurance, which found that almost a quarter (24%) of these customers had fallen victim to ID fraud. Common reasons for revealing…
School district hiding behind a criminal investigation – parent
On the principle of “no good deed goes unpunished,” some of those who have discovered and reported breaches have been terminated or prosecuted for their actions, such as Providence Home Services systems analyst Steven Shields who alleged that he was fired for reporting a breach, John Denning who alleges that Kaiser fired him because he…