Kelly Field reports: Angry lawmakers hammered the Education Department’s chief information officer, Danny A. Harris, at a hearing Tuesday, accusing him of ethical lapses and failing to secure the agency’s “vulnerable” information systems. “Cybersecurity for the federal government is a matter of quality management and effective leadership, not just tech,” said Rep. Will Hurd, a Texas Republican…
Category: Education Sector
Defendant in U. Northern Iowa tax refund fraud scheme to plead guilty
There’s an update to the data breach involving the University of Northern Iowa. As reported previously, Bernard Ogie Oretekor (aka Emmanuel Libs) was charged in an identity theft tax refund fraud scheme that impacted 100 UNI faculty members. Now KWWL reports that he will plead guilty and the charges will be transferred to California, where he…
U. British Columbia statement re: FOI privacy breach
On January 25, 2016, UBC responded to numerous FOI requests related to the resignation of Dr. Arvind Gupta from his post as UBC’s President in August 2015. Due to the large number of requests, and the large number of responsive pages, UBC chose to consolidate these requests and posted a package of 861 responsive pages…
Ministry of Education failed to protect personal information involving missing portable hard drive
VICTORIA—In an investigation report released today, B.C. Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham found that the Ministry of Education failed to protect the personal information of 3.4 million B.C. and Yukon students stored on a portable hard drive. “This investigation is unique in that we are looking at events that happened more than four years ago. The passage of…
Florida International University data hacked and dumped: claim
On January 16, DataBreaches.net attempted to notify Florida International University about a possible hack after seeing email addresses and plain text passwords of what appear to be faculty and students at FIU have been dumped on a paste site. This site sent FIU a sample of the records in the paste with a link to the paste, noting that there…
North Carolina State University investigating claimed hack (UPDATED)
On January 17, DataBreaches.net became aware of data that had been uploaded to a paste site on January 15. It claimed to be data from the cwise subdomain of North Carolina State University’s web site. From that site: The NOAA Cooperative Program for Climate & Weather Impacts on Society and the Environment (CWISE) is a collaboration between NOAA’s National Climatic Data…