And yet another breach disclosed at the beginning of a holiday weekend – this one posted by the State of Alaska: September 1, 2017 ANCHORAGE – The Alaska Department of Health and Social Services had a security breach that may have disclosed personal information of individuals who have interacted with the Office of Children’s Services….
Category: Government Sector
AU: Medicare data breach: government response ‘contemptible’, says former AFP officer
Melissa Davey reports: The federal government’s response to a Medicare data breach that led to patient details being sold on the dark web was “disappointing, confusing and often contemptible,” according to a former detective who headed the Australian federal police’s investigations into high-tech crime. Nigel Phair, now an adjunct professor at the University of Canberra’s…
Mystery surrounds malware attack that forced German state parliament offline
Graham Cluley reports: According to media reports, a malware attack has managed to disrupt the operations of parliamentary business in the German federal state of Saxony-Anhalt. The problem at the Saxony-Anhalt Landtag appears to have started after a state parliament employee opened a malicious email attachment on Wednesday that proceeded to infect their PC. The…
GAO to agencies: Stop using Social Security numbers for everything
There really is such as a thing as “obvious.” Isn’t there? Adam Stone reports: Federal agencies continue to over-collect, over-use and over-display Social Security numbers, leading to the an unnecessarily high risk of identity theft. That’s the latest from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In a recent report GAO declares that a decade’s worth of…
UK: Nottinghamshire County Council fined £70,000 for data protection breach
From the Information Commissioner’s Office: A council has been fined £70,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for leaving vulnerable people’s personal information exposed online for five years. The Data Protection Act requires organisations to take appropriate measures to keep personal data secure, especially when dealing with sensitive information. But Nottinghamshire County Council posted the…
Turkey Arrests Five Suspects in Qatar News Agency Hacking
Albawaba reports: Qatar has said that five suspected computer hackers have been arrested in Turkey in connection with a cyber attack on Qatar’s state news agency last May. Qatar’s general prosecutor Ali bin Fetais al-Marri said on Friday during a press conference in Ankara that the suspects have been accused of involvement in the attack…