Texas Comptroller Susan Combs today said her office is taking additional steps to assist the 3.5 million Texans whose personal information — including names and Social Security numbers — was publicly accessible for more than a year because of a data security lapse by the comptroller’s office. Among those steps: Beginning Friday, a year of…
Category: Government Sector
TX: Comptroller heads to court after security breach
John A. Salazar reports: The Texas Comptroller faces her first legal hurdle after a year-long privacy breach resulted in the online exposure of 3.5 million Texans’ private information. The Texas Civil Rights Project and Austin attorney Jim Harrington filed a petition against Comptroller Susan Combs in District Court. The petition asks for Combs to go on…
Sealed Records Exposed In Major Court Gaffe
In a shocking failure to protect sensitive details about dozens of ongoing criminal investigations, federal officials somehow allowed confidential information about sealed cases to be publicly accessible via the court system’s online lookup service, The Smoking Gun has learned. Over the past nine months, details of 40 separate sealed court applications filed by federal prosecutors…
Texas fires two tech chiefs over breach
Jaikumar Vijayan reports: The Texas State Comptroller’s office has fired its heads of information security and of innovation and technology following an inadvertent data leak that exposed Social Security numbers and other personal information on over 3.2 million people in the state. Two other employees have also been fired over the incident, a statement posted…
ESA hack did not breach internal network
Jack Clark reports: The European Space Agency has confirmed that a hacker entered its FTP servers and took sensitive data, including hundreds of passwords. The data breach exposed more than 200 usernames, passwords and email addresses, as well as server logs, the agency said on Tuesday. A Romanian hacker named ‘TinKode’ has claimed responsibility for…
Ca: Software glitch kills electronic stubs for federal workers’ paycheques
Dean Beebe reports: A mysterious security breach has shut down the federal government’s online pay system, affecting some 320,000 public servants. The system was pulled offline for “urgent” repairs on April 4 after officials discovered the privacy of eight account-holders had been breached. Pay is still being deposited as scheduled in employees’ bank accounts. But…