Ouch. Howard Solomon reports: Mistakes can happen in any organization, but when the office of the federal privacy commissioner loses an unencrypted hard drive with personal information it must sting. But that’s what happened on Feb 14 during the agency’s move to Gatineau, Que. from its home across the river in Ottawa. The Toronto Star revealed the…
Category: Government Sector
MA: Records with private info about Quincy vets found on city streets
Dozens of old city records containing private information about local military veterans were strewn about a Quincy Center neighborhood Tuesday, blowing around in the wind and available for anyone to pick up and view. The records, some of which contained personal information for Quincy military veterans, such as Social Security numbers, bank account data, healthcare…
Ca: Southwest Community Business Development Corp. claims there’s nothing they can do if someone steals a laptop with unencrypted information from an employee’s unattended vehicle. Srsly??????
CBC News reports: A laptop with a database containing the personal financial information, names, birth dates, social insurance numbers, and addresses of 92 people has been stolen in Saint John, a CBC News investigation reveals. The laptop, containing the information of an identity thief’s dreams, was left in a car overnight, unattended. The car’s window…
University of Virginia, Spokeo, Indiana among eight more sites hacked by NullCrew (update1)
Students and employees of the University of Virginia (UVa) may be scratching their heads today and wondering what UVa can or will do to secure its servers better. The university, which was hacked in 2012 by @AnonAntidote and again in 2013 by a former UVa student known as @R00tTh3B0x, has reportedly been hacked yet again –…
Maryland state agencies hit by cyberattacks, records show
Capital News Service reports: Maryland government entities have suffered at least six cyberattacks since the beginning of 2013, according to incident reports from the Department of Information Technology. The heavily-redacted reports, obtained by Capital News Service through a Maryland Public Information Act request, reveal that data-hungry hackers and scammers aren’t only going after retailers like…
SEC Needs to Improve Controls over Financial Systems and Data – GAO Report
Highlights from a GAO report released yesterday: Although the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had implemented and made progress in strengthening information security controls, weaknesses limited their effectiveness in protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of a key financial system. For this system’s network, servers, applications, and databases, weaknesses in several controls were found, as…