Corey Larocque reports: Snooping through confidential police records and relating their contents to a friend will cost Ottawa Police Const. Jennifer Finniss three days’ pay and force her to stay home for 20 days. Even though her motivation was to help a friend, Finniss, an 18-year veteran cop, “should have known better” than to make…
Category: Government Sector
UK: Norfolk County Council sells filing cabinet with confidential information still inside
Dan Grimmer reports: New figures have revealed the number of data breaches at local authorities in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire over the past year, with more than 200 incidents where information councils are entrusted with was not handled properly. One of the most shocking blunders came in Norfolk where confidential files containing details of adults…
VA: Twin computer prodigies plead guilty to schemes to hack State Dept., others
Justin Jouvenal has an update on a case previously reported on this site in May: Twin brothers from Springfield have pleaded guilty in federal court in Alexandria to a series of computer hacking schemes that involved stealing credit card information, breaking into State Department computers and obtaining data from a private company. Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter,…
FBI Cyber Division Bulletin on Tools Reportedly Used by OPM Hackers
Public Intelligence reports: The following bulletin was released to private industry partners June 5, 2015. According to an article from Reuters, one of the remote access tools (RAT) described in the bulletin, called Sakula, is directly linked to the hack of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that was disclosed earlier this month. Other publications have directly…
ATF executive investigated by DOJ for possible employee data breach
Evan Perez reports: The Justice Department is investigating whether an executive at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives improperly accessed and downloaded the personal information of other employees, according to law enforcement officials briefed on the probe. The investigation centers on whether Scott Sweetow, deputy assistant director for strategic intelligence and information at ATF…
CA: Rogue court clerk may have altered records in more than 1,000 cases
Debra Cassens Weiss reports: An investigation of altered court files in Orange County, California, is leading to one rogue clerk, according to legal counsel for the county court system. Lawyer Jeffrey Wertheimer tells the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register that the clerk appears to have altered more than 1,000 DUI and misdemeanor traffic cases since 2010…