WRAL reports that North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services is notifying 1,615 Medicaid patients that a breach of security protocol may have compromised their confidential health information. The breach occurred Aug. 19, when an email with an attached spreadsheet was emailed without encryption to the Granville County Health Department. Although the email was…
Category: Government Sector
Changing ID numbers in wake of Japan Pension Service breach resulted in payment errors
The Japan Pension Service breach was a huge deal in Japan this summer, and it’s still having an impact as attempts to secure pensioners’ information by changing their ID numbers seems to have resulted in some people being overpaid while others were underpaid. Kyodo News reports: The Japan Pension Service mistakenly underpaid and overpaid about…
Veterans Administration September report includes four breaches, each affecting multiple veterans
Okay, so maybe I jinxed things when I reported how well the Veterans Administration had done in August in reducing the number of breaches involving personal information. By September, it was back to same old, same old. Here’s a brief rundown on the breaches involving personal information of multiple individuals reported by the VA to Congress for the month of…
Wiener Linien insider data breach and leak affects 20,000 customers
The Local (Austria) reports: Personal data belonging to around 20,000 customers of the Vienna public transport company Wiener Linien has been stolen and published online. The Wiener Linien said the data, which included personal information such as names, addresses and email addresses but not payment data, was stolen by a former employee of its online…
US taxman slammed: Half of the IRS’s servers still run doomed Windows Server 2003
Kieren McCarthy reports: Half of America’s Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) servers are running Windows Server 2003, despite extended support for it ending in July. That’s according to a report by the Treasury Inspector General that took a look at the IRS’ $139m upgrade program. The report is distinctly unimpressed and notes that the IRS “did not follow established policies…
Aadhaar encryption protects privacy, will take eons to crack
Mahendra Singh & Rajeev Deshpande report: The Aadhaar system’s data collection and storage is strongly protected by sophisticated encryption processes to ensure biometric data does not leak either through private contractors running enrollment centres or at the central data servers that store the details. […] The encryption uses highest available public key cryptography encryption (PKI-2048…