A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Ala., returned an indictment charging Harvey James for using stolen identities to file false tax returns, the Justice Department the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced yesterday. The 34-count indictment charges James with mail fraud and aggravated identity theft. According to the indictment, Harvey James obtained stolen identities from individuals…
Category: Government Sector
News Group chief responds to Berkeley privacy breach
Emile Raguso has more on a case where a response to a freedom of information request exposed Social Security numbers on 11,000 municipal employees: Following this week’s disclosure by Berkeley city staff that roughly 11,000 municipal employee social security numbers had been erroneously divulged to a local media outlet in March, the media outlet’s managing editor said…
CA: Government data breached thousands of times in last decade, documents say
Jordan Press reports: The federal government has seen more than 3,000 data and privacy breaches over the past 10 years, breaches that have affected more than 725,350 Canadians, according to documents tabled in Parliament on Tuesday. The responses from departments, given to the New Democrats in response to an order paper question, also show that…
NZ: Ministry breaches pupils’ privacy
Unbelievable how many email breaches we’re seeing reported in New Zealand recently. Here’s yet another one: The Privacy Commissioner has been notified after the school marks of 38 teenaged pupils were sent to the wrong email recipients. Acting Secretary for Education Peter Hughes announced the privacy breach today, in relation to a PISA international study…
AU IT security professional arrested; part of LulzSec
James W. Manning reports that a self-proclaimed leader of LulzSec known by the screen name of “Aush0k” has been arrested in Australia. And not surprisingly, the IT security firm he worked for as an IT professional has fired the 24-year-old. Matthew Flannery was arrested after he allegedly infiltrated a government website earlier this month. No…
Shocking! Maharashtra admits it lost Aadhaar data of three lakh people
Data loss, but no seemingly big risk of data misuse: Maharashtra government has lost data of about three lakh people collected under the controversial Aadhaar scheme, mostly from Mumbai who enrolled into the number scheme. According to a report in the Times of India, the data containing permanent account number (PAN) and biometric information was lost…