Tim Hull reports: Countrywide Financial employees stole and sold “tens of thousands, or millions” of customers’ personal financial information, invading their privacy and exposing them to identity theft, a class action claims in Ventura County Court, Calif. The class seeks to know, among other things, whether Countryside merely aided and abetted the theft and illegal…
Category: Financial Sector
Former FDIC Employee Admits Leaking Financial Data
Merikay Wootton, 63, Lenexa, Kansas, has pleaded guilty to disclosing confidential information while she was an employee of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, U.S. Attorney Lanny Welch said today. Wootton pleaded guilty to unlawfully disclosing confidential information from a government agency. In her plea, she admitted she was working as a loan officer for Columbian…
Unencrypted personal info of LPL Financial clients on stolen device
As I’ve noted in the past, LPL Financial has reported a number of breaches in the past few years, none of which seem to have been reported in the mainstream media. On March 9, the firm reported yet another breach. According to a letter sent by Marc Loewenthal, Senior Vice President and Chief Security/Privacy Officer…
MidFlorida Credit Union Issuing New Cards
Kyle Kennedy reports that new fraud reports have emerged related to the Heartland Payment Systems breach disclosed in January 2009 and that a credit union is now replacing additional cards: Some MidFlorida Credit Union members are getting new debit cards because of a fraud risk. Kathy Britt, chief operations officer for Lakeland-based MidFlorida, said the…
(update) ECMC breach due to failure to adhere to policies
Small note for those who look for official disclosure and notification letters: the notification sent by the Educational Credit Management Corp (ECMC) to New Hampshire with a copy of its notification to those affected is now available online (pdf). In other news on the breach, Kelly Jackson Higgins of Dark Reading points out that the…
Student loan company: Data on 3.3M people stolen
From the Associated Press: A company that guarantees federal student loans said Friday that personal data on about 3.3 million people nationwide has been stolen from its headquarters in Minnesota. Educational Credit Management Corp. said the data included names, addresses, Social Security numbers and dates of birth of borrowers, but no financial or bank account…