Thanks to Joe Howie of BeyondRecognition.net for alerting me to what appears to be a very long-running, inadequately remedied breach that has exposed – and may be continuing to expose – the Social Security numbers and other personal information of thousands of people. I am posting this with some hesitation, as the data may still…
Category: Government Sector
Belgian Privacy Commission refers data breach case to Public Prosecutor
On April 29, 2013, the Belgian Privacy Commission announced that it referred a data breach case involving The National Belgian Railway Company to the Brussels Public Prosecutor. The data breach, which occurred in December 2012, resulted in the 1.46 million sets of customer data being made publicly available online. The Privacy Commission investigated the case…
Update: MN seeks dismissal of suits over DNR data breach
Associated Press reports that Minnesota is seeking dismissal of lawsuits stemming from an employee’s improper access to the state’s driver’s license database: The state of Minnesota has asked a federal judge to dismiss five lawsuits filed on behalf of several people who say their driver’s license data was improperly accessed by a Department of Natural…
Update: Biometric information of 14 lakh Aadhar applicants goes missing
So it seems it may not be 300,000 biometric national ID records lost, but 1.4 million….
Alabama Man Indicted for Multi-Million Dollar Stolen Identity Refund Fraud Scheme Using Prisoner Identities
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…
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…