AP reports: Montana health officials have fired two employees for providing the Social Security numbers and other personal information of 185 childcare providers to three state legislators. The Associated Press obtained copies of letters mailed to the Republican lawmakers from Department of Public Health and Human Services director Richard Opper asking them to destroy the…
Category: Government Sector
Chinese businessman gets nearly 4 years in prison for US hacking case
Updating a case originally reported in March. Steven Musil reports: A Chinese businessman has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison for conspiring to hack the computer systems of Boeing and other US defense contractors to steal military technical data. Su Bin, a Chinese national and the owner of a Chinese aviation technology company, was sentenced…
US govt bank insurer ‘covered up China hack to protect top boss’
Shaun Nichols reports: The US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – a government agency tasked with safeguarding citizens’ bank accounts – deliberately covered up a cyberattack by China to protect its incoming chairman. This is according to a damning report from Republican members of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who slammed the bank…
Leaky database leaves Oklahoma police, bank vulnerable to intruders
Dell Cameron reports: A leaky database has exposed the physical security of multiple Oklahoma Department of Public Safety facilities and at least one Oklahoma bank. The vulnerability—which has reportedly been fixed—was revealed on Tuesday by Chris Vickery, a MacKeeper security researcher who this year has revealed numerous data breaches affecting millions of Americans. The misconfigured…
Laptop theft puts personal information of hundreds of Pennsylvania taxpayers at risk
WTAE reports that the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue is notifying 865 taxpayers whose information was on a stolen laptop. Why they would claim this notification is in an “abundance of caution” defies belief. An “abundance of caution” would have involved deploying adequate security and not leaving the damned laptops in an unattended vehicle. Read more…
AU: Breach sees abusive dad given address to his kids
It’s these “small breaches” that are often the most worrisome, as I’ve said ad nauseum for a decade. Here’s a case where an agency screws up, and their incident response is appalling – and dare I say, negligent. Yahoo7 reports: A violent father barred from seeing his children has been handed their new address in a…