Wow. Rachel Weiner reports that data in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack may have shown up as part of a fraud scheme: Four years after hackers stole personal information from over 22 million people through the Office of Personnel Management, a fraud scheme exploiting that data has come to light in southeast Virginia….
Category: Government Sector
Arizona Man Sentenced to Prison for Distributed Denial of Service Attacks against Emergency Communications System and Other Municipal Websites
There’s a follow-up to a case noted previously on this blog involving a serial DDoS attacker described by others as the internet’s most inept criminal. From the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Arizona, today: An Arizona man was sentenced yesterday in Phoenix, Ariz., for directing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks at the computer networks…
Lawsuit claims Kansas official exposed private voter data
Roxana Hegeman reports: A civil rights group filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach challenging a multi-state voter registration database it claims exposed sensitive information including partial Social Security numbers from nearly a thousand state voters. The complaint by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas alleges “reckless maintenance” of…
New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7
There’s a huge update in a significant case noted last month on this blog. Adam Goldman reports: Federal prosecutors have charged a former software engineer at the center of a huge C.I.A. breach with stealing classified information, theft of government property and lying to the F.B.I. The engineer, Joshua A. Schulte, 29, of New York,…
Asylum seeker spreadsheet data blurt: UK Home Office loses appeal to limit claimants
Rebecca Hill reports: The British Home Office’s bid to reduce the number of potential claimants from a 2013 data breach that exposed the personal details of thousands of asylum seekers has been knocked back by the Court of Appeal. Rather than simply publishing overall statistics on the family returns process – the system by which…
Two El Paso County Sheriff’s employees claim county should pay them $400k for accidental leak of their personnel info.
We’ve seen mistakes made in responding to public records requests that result in people’s personnel information or identity information being improperly released. But if there’s a mistake, and the receiving party is a journalist who agrees NOT to use the information and who destroys the data, should those whose data were revealed be entitled to…