Fiona Callingham reports: Portsmouth City Council could face hefty fines under General Data Protection Regulations after it was discovered that for the past two years contractors have not been obliged to erase data when removing old computer drives. Auditors revealed the discrepancy in a report that was discussed at today’s governance and audit and standards…
Category: Government Sector
Possible data breach of Wellington billing and payment system
Scott Sutton reports: Wellington officials said Thursday they were recently notified about potential unauthorized charges on credit cards used by customers to pay their utility bills. In a written statement, the village said on Wednesday they received a call from their vendor, Superion, notifying them of vulnerabilities in their software related to Click2Gov online payments for utility bills. Credit…
Atlanta officials reveal worsening effects of cyber attack
Reuter reports that the March 22 ransomware attack on Atlanta was even worse than they had let on. More than a third of the 424 software programs used by the city have been thrown offline or partially disabled in the incident, Atlanta Information Management head Daphne Rackley said. Nearly 30 percent of the affected applications…
Feds say they caught ‘Vigilance’ hacker who broke into several state databases
Chao Xiong reports: A young hacker reeling from the Philando Castile case and the acquittal of the officer who killed him broke into several state databases last year and boasted about his exploits. “An innocent man is dead, while a guilty man is free,” the hacker, known as “Vigilance” tweeted in part last year. The…
MI: Phishing scam costs Shiawassee County $50,000
Tim Rath reports: The Shiawassee County financial administrator resigned this week after being caught in a phishing scam and mistakenly wiring $50,000 to an overseas bank account. Patricia Fitnich, who had been on the job about two years, thought she was replying to a message from Shiawassee County Board of Commissioners Chairman Jeff Bartz about…
‘Embarrassing’ leak shows EU falls short of own GDPR data law
Margi Murphy Ben Riley-Smith report: The European Commission has claimed it is not subject to the strict new data protection law that it has imposed across Europe, following an “embarrassing” leak of personal data on its website. Officials in Brussels admitted the bureaucracy that designed the rules is not itself compliant with the General Data Protection…