Eoghan McNeill reports: An email account operated by the Gardaí yesterday inadvertently circulated the personal email addresses of 1,500 people after an administration error. Dublin North Central Gardaí sent a community policing information bulletin to 1,746 people, failing to hide recipients’ addresses to others receiving the newsletter. Email addresses can be considered “personal data” in…
Category: Exposure
Hacker ‘Rawshark’ disrupts NZ election campaign
Rob O’Neill reports that the hacking of blogger Cameron Slater’s Whale Oil email account, and the exposure of those emails (and other materials apparently not from his email account) in a book and to the media is disrupting national elections in New Zealand: New Zealand cabinet minister Judith Collins resigned yesterday in what appears to…
OH: Forest Hills data security breach roils parents
Ally Marotti and Bowdeya Tweh report: The Forest Hills School District had a computer security breach earlier this month, where information on all of the district’s more than 9,000 students was accidentally sent to most district parents. District officials Friday told parents about the breach that included student identification numbers, home addresses and parent email…
UK: Lincolnshire County Council apologizes to 4,000 people for breach
David Ionescu reports: Lincolnshire County Council is apologising after a ‘data breach’ which led to the names and email addresses of more than 4,000 people being sent to some 250 email addresses. The incident happened on August 6 when 250 people received an email regarding changes to the County Council’s jobs site, to which the…
Oops! Mozilla left thousands of email addresses and passwords lying around (again)
Graham Cluley reports: At the beginning of August members of the Mozilla developer community were warned that approximately 76,000 email addresses and 4,000 encrypted passwords had been left on a publicly accessible server for 30 days. For most organisations, that would be embarrassing enough. But security screw-ups can be like buses, you can wait for ages noticing…
Federal police mistakenly publish metadata from criminal investigations
Paul Farrell reports: The Australian federal police mistakenly published highly sensitive information – including metadata – connected to criminal investigations, in a serious breach of operational security. Guardian Australia can reveal that the AFP provided documents to the Senate, which were then made publicly available online on parliamentary sites and other sources for several years,…