Laura Hautala reports: Maybe I’m naive to expect a certain savviness about privacy from the FTC, especially just before it convenes a group of experts in privacy and cybersecurity at a conference in Washington, DC, next week. I certainly didn’t expect the agency to accidentally send out a list of every attendee’s email address. But,…
Category: Government Sector
Hacked OPM won’t cough up documents on mega-breach – claim
Shaun Nichols reports: The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) – which handles sensitive files on millions of government workers and was thoroughly ransacked by hackers – is withholding thousands of documents from Congress, which is probing the cyber-attack. This is according to members of the House Committee on Oversight, who took OPM to task…
Ca: Data breach involving Montreal Police?
Andrew Paplowski reports: Montreal Police will not confirm, but there is a report this morning they are going all out to try to recover sensitive information stolen from the private vehicle of a senior police officer, while he was attending a Christmas party. The Journal de Montreal says the bag of Captain Patrice Vilceus was…
Personal info of 60 Ohioans in records given out
Randy Ludlow reports: A state agency mistakenly turned over the personal information and bank-account numbers of about 60 Ohioans to a pair of vendors, including one that sent the records to be copied by a third party. Officials of the MARCS emergency-communications system within the Department of Administrative Services didn’t notify people whose Social Security,…
40,000 Packages of Backlogged Claims Material Discovered at Single VA Office
This is absolutely disgraceful. Morgan Chalfant reports: More than 40,000 backlogged mail packages of veterans’ disability claims material were discovered at a VA regional office in Florida, according to a new report from the VA inspector general. Investigators also found more than 1,600 boxes of unprocessed veterans’ claims material at a scanning facility with which the St….
Watchdog slams laptop security at Dept. of the Interior
Greg Otto reports: Nearly 12,000 Interior Department laptops are inadequately protected against the theft of personally identifiable information due to poorly configured software. In a management advisory obtained by FedScoop, the department’s Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall wrote that a large number of laptops have their full-disk encryption software configured to run post-boot user authentication,…