It seems like only last week I was reading about how the Lancashire Constabulary had to sign an undertaking with the Information Commissioner’s Office because they exposed personal information. Oh wait, it was last week. Now, it seems, they may be in trouble again – and again, it involves failing to secure and protect the…
Category: Exposure
Another simple human error results in breach costs
Lincoln National Life Insurance Company and Lincoln Life & Annuity Company of New York recently notified 705 individuals of a breach following an e-mail error by a home employee. According to their letter to the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office of July 13, on April 29, the employee sent an encrypted email to a third-party…
WA: Social Security Numbers of 20,000 Swedish Med. Ctr. employees exposed on the web for 9 weeks
Carol M. Ostrom reports: Swedish Medical Center is alerting nearly 20,000 current and former employees that their personal information — including Social Security numbers — was accidentally made accessible on the Internet for a nine-week period. Read more on Seattle Times. A notice to employees, on an internal page of the medical center’s web site reads: July 20,…
Ru: Megafon screws up and users’ SMS messages get indexed by a search engine
Eugene Kapersky writes: One of the biggest Russian mobile operators Megafon with 57+ million user base leaked the users’ SMS history. Thousands of messages are now available online that caused a major nation-wide scandal. There is another company that may have been involved in the issue – Yandex, the biggest national search engine that could have indexed either some classified storage or SMS…
Settlement of yet another lawsuit against WellPoint /Anthem Blue Cross gets preliminary approval
If you feel like you need a scorecard to keep track of lawsuits against WellPoint or settlements involving WellPoint, it’s understandable. WellPoint recently settled a lawsuit by the Indiana Attorney General’s Office over delayed notification following a breach that occurred in 2009 and continued until after a customer notified them twice in 2010. Then they settled…
NE: ‘Unfortunate situation’ at Kitchen Place auction
We’ve known for a long time that when businesses fold, they may just dump records with sensitive information instead of disposing of them properly. And in many states, such actions would not necessarily be illegal. Here’s a timely reminder from Nebraska about a bankruptcy auction involving the Kitchen Place: Two file cabinets that…