An update to a hacking case involving an NYPD detective that was previously noted on this blog (here). Edwin Vargas, a detective with the New York City Police Department (NYPD), pled guilty to computer hacking crimes. Specifically, Vargas paid others to hack into e-mail accounts, including e-mail accounts belonging to other NYPD officers and employees, and…
Category: Government Sector
Update: Baltimore County finds additional personal info on contents stolen from hard drive
An update to the breach reported in this blog entry. As if the breach wasn’t bad enough already, further investigation revealed: … individual checking and bank routing numbers were also stolen. Those particular files of 6,633 employees were also improperly copied from a County employee’s work computer on May 9, 2012. In a letter that…
Snowden persuaded other NSA workers to give up passwords – sources
Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel report that Edward Snowden successfully socially engineered employees at the NSA into giving him their login credentials: Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden used login credentials and passwords provided unwittingly by colleagues at a spy base in Hawaii to access some of the classified material he leaked to…
GA: Personal info of Fulton Co. workers given out in mix-up
Aungelique Proctor reports: FOX 5 has learned a couple of hundred government employees could have had their Social Security numbers given out during open enrollment. Ammie Jones said she was startled when she saw total (sic) the names of strangers listed as the beneficiaries on her life insurance policy. “It was someone else’s name,” Jones…
MN: Auditor says slack procedures contributed to MNsure breach
Jackie Crosby reports: The state’s Office of the Legislative Auditor said Thursday that a data privacy breach at MNsure involving 1,600 Social Security numbers was unintentional, but that slack internal procedures at the new health insurance exchange agency “contributed directly” to the disclosure. In a 22-page report, Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles found “no evidence of…
Baltimore police officer pleads to extortion and ID theft
Ian Duncan reports: A Baltimore police officer pleaded guilty to identity theft and extortion Wednesday after being caught in an elaborate FBI sting that involved an informant posing as a crooked tax preparer and heroin dealer. Over the course of this spring, Ashley Roane, 26, worked with the informant to try to file false tax…