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…
Category: Government Sector
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…
Lauri Love fights extradition to US for allegedly hacking U.S. govt agencies
Bethany Horne reports that as expected, Lauri Love will be fighting attempts to extradite him to the U.S. to face hacking charges. The US alleges Love is a “sophisticated computer hacker” loosely affiliated with the Anonymous hacker collective, and that he “secretly infiltrated” computer systems used by a long list of government agencies including the Federal Reserve,…
Someone Hacked Uniformed Services University and Leaked Their Credentials Online
Waqas reports: A hacker going with the online handle of Kuroi SH hacked and defaced several domains of the United States based Uniformed Services University and leaked 2014 login credentials online. Uniformed Services University (USU) is the country’s only Federal Health Sciences University whose primary mission is to prepare graduates for service to the U.S. at home…