Daniel Hurst reports: Australia’s top immigration bureaucrat has told a Senate committee he is yet to make a call on whether asylum seekers will be told that his department released their confidential personal details on its website. Martin Bowles, secretary of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, characterised the data breach as “regrettable” but…
Category: Exposure
OR: Office landlord fined after trashing mortgage records in course of eviction
Eliot Njus reports: The owners of a Northeast Portland office building have been fined after a state regulator said its cleaning service threw 30 boxes of mortgage records into an unlocked trash bin while evicting a mortgage company. The Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services has ordered 122nd Group LLC to pay $5,000 for failing to…
Study shows recycled computers give away personal information
A study commissioned in Australia by the National Association for Information Destruction (NAID), a non-profit, data protection watchdog agency, has found significant amounts of personal information left on recycled computers. For the organisations recycling their drives, this is a data breach problem. For individuals, their most private information is at risk. The NAID-ANZ Secondhand Hard…
Ten months later, Memphis Police Dept. first notifies people of data breach?
Melissa Moon reports: A security breach at the Memphis Police Department may have compromised the personal information of thousands. It happened nearly a year ago, but those at risk are just finding out about it. Memphis Police say in April of 2013 someone hacked into a database system used to search for people, residences, and…
CalRecycle notifies employees after e-mail breach disclosed their Social Security numbers
California’s Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle), which is under the Department of Environmental Protection, is notifying employees of a recent breach involving Social Security numbers. The text of the letter to employees, which has been uploaded to the California Attorney General’s public breach list, explains: On January 23, 2014, the Human Resources Office…
Blue Shield of California notifies agents that their SSN was exposed
Blue Shield of California is notifying some agents that their Tax Identification Numbers – which are often the agents’ Social Security Numbers – were accidentally disclosed to some of the agents’ clients who attempted to pay their bills online. In a letter dated today, BSC writes that the problem with SSN exposure existed between December…