Ryan Singel reports: The inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration is investigating a potential data breach of tens of million of records about U.S. military veterans, after the agency sent a defective hard drive back to its vendor for repair and recycling without first destroying the data. At issue is a hard…
Category: Exposure
Oops! Mizzou sells phones without wiping memory
Jim Salter reports: Mike Bellman got more than he bargained for when he purchased a box of old cell phones from the University of Missouri athletics department. Bellman bought the cell phones earlier this year at a university surplus sale with the intent of reselling them for parts. He paid $190 for 25 old cell…
Update: NM agencies investigate found files
As an update to an incident previously reported, Gerald Garner Jr. reports: After learning that a handful of sensitive documents had been “discarded” in a local dumpster, Socorro County and county housing authority officials launched an investigation into the matter. In a joint agency press release — issued Monday, Sept. 28 — officials contend the…
File Cabinet Purchase Leads To Identity Theft Concerns
Some former and current Panola School District, Oklahoma employees are learning that some of their employment records from 1998 and 1999, including W-2’s, were in file cabinets sold to the public. Now the people who bought the cabinets are declining to turn the records over to the school district without a court order and are…
Judge orders Google to deactivate user’s Gmail account, but wait, there’s more…
Wendy Davis reports that in the Rocky Mountain Bank case previously covered here: In a highly unusual move, a federal judge has ordered Google to deactivate the email account of a user who was mistakenly sent confidential financial information by a bank. The order, issued Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge James Ware in the…
State Requiring Prompt Med To Appear At Hearing About Dumped Records
As a follow-up to a breach previously reported, Kerri Hartsfield reports: The State Department of Justice is requiring an attorney for Prompt Med to appear at a hearing after hundreds of medical records were found in a dumpster and sitting alongside a street. Last month, a 2 Wants to Know investigation revealed that more than…