Joseph Curtis reports: A town clerk mistakenly opened a virus loaded email and wiped out every council document in the system since 2015. John Vanderwolfe, of Tiverton Town Council in Devon, said it was ‘the worst thing that’s happened in his 12 years in the role’, and added the blunder ‘is a lesson to us…
Category: Government Sector
Two people arrested in U.K. in hacking of D.C. police closed-circuit camera network
Peter Hermann reports: Two people have been arrested in London in the hacking of storage devices that record data from D.C. police surveillance cameras, law enforcement authorities said Thursday. The arrests were made in the south London neighborhood of Streatham and followed a search warrant that was served Jan. 19, the day before the presidential…
Big Brother Watch calls for stiffer penalties for PNSI breaches
67 officers or staff of the Police Service in Northern Ireland have been investigated for police computer misuse over the last three years, it has been revealed. Suspected data protection breaches involved inappropriate access to PSNI systems. Read more on The Nationalist for more details on the cases.
Russian hackers behind attempted Polish foreign ministry hack: report
Radio Poland reports: A hacking attempt in December on the computer servers of the Polish Foreign Ministry was likely the work of Russian hackers, according to the Rzeczpospolita daily. The alleged hackers were part of the APT28 group, also known as the Fancy Bear cyber espionage group, which experts identify as being associated with the…
GSA IT gaps leaked personal information, OIG says
Carten Cordell reports: A series of four audits by the General Services Administration’s inspector general have found that the agency’s cloud computing system made personally identifiable information accessible to employees and contractors not authorized to have it. The audits, which were instituted after the OIG found multiple instances where sensitive information was accessible on GSA’s…
TX: Cockrell Hill police lose some evidence in ransomware attack
Jason Trahan reports that when the Cockrell Hill Police Department server was infected with ransomware after an employee clicked on a link in an email that appeared to be from the department, the department decided not to pay the $4,000 ransom demand. As a result, Trahan reports, the department lost some video evidence and a…