In the UK, the Treasury Solicitor’s Department has signed an undertaking with the Information Commissioenr’s Office. As described in the undertaking, there had been a number self-reported breaches involving exposure of individuals’ information due to incomplete redactions or failure to fully check: The Information Commissioner (the ‘Commissioner’) was contacted by the data controller on 6…
Category: Exposure
Indiana University notifying 146,000 current & former students that details were accessed by webcrawlers over 11-month period
Indiana University issued the following statement today: Indiana University notified the Indiana attorney general’s office today of the potential exposure of personal data for some students and recent graduates. The data potentially at risk for disclosure includes names, addresses and Social Security numbers for approximately 146,000 students and recent graduates across seven IU campuses who…
Asylum seeker data breach: no decision yet on whether to inform those affected
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…
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…