As noted here and elsewhere, the number of breaches reported in the media and other sources declined in 2009 relative to 2008, but newly obtained data suggests that once again, there was much that we did not know. During the period September 1 – December 31, 2009, 141 breach reports were received by the…
Category: Exposure
NY’s Higher Education Services Corp had its own breach last year
In discussing the huge Educational Credit Management Corp data breach previously covered on this site, Rick Karlin of the Times Union mentions a second and unrelated breach, this one by New York’s Higher Education Services Corp: [The breach] happened back in December when 1,433 e-mails from HESC ran into a “process error” by which the…
VA cops investigated for privacy violation
William R. Levesque reports: The door was supposed to be locked. It wasn’t. Two officers patrolling the Bay Pines VA Medical Center stepped inside. They found a stack of papers that should have been locked away. Some contained private patient information — Social Security numbers, treatment information, patient addresses. To figure out who could be…
Confidential information about students left exposed in Education Ministry hallway
Or Kashti reports: Sensitive personal information about students, including psychological diagnoses and school evaluations, is being stored at an unsupervised location in a corridor of an Education Ministry building in Jerusalem. Any visitor who gets through the building’s initial security inspection, if he were so inclined, could look through the documents and even take them….
(follow-up) Leak of Atlanta firefighter data due to filesharing
Some additional information on a leak involving personal information on some Atlanta firefighters suggests that the files wound up on the Internet due to a filesharing program. As interesting, some city officials first found out about the leak during a security workshop where a presenter used the data as an example of what you can…
Credit applications found near store Dumpster
Lisa Beisel reports: Reginald Faust of Annapolis was walking with his wife when he noticed a piece of paper – a credit application for the Room Store, he later realized – on the ground near a Dumpster in the shopping center across from the mall on Jennifer Road. He was one of several walkers in…