Angus Howarth reports: A drug-dealing police worker caught with secret work documents at her home was jailed for over two years yesterday. Laura Young copied crime files and police reports while working at Grampian Police headquarters in Aberdeen. The 22-year-old even showed a confidential file to the person concerned in the report. She also obtained…
Category: Government Sector
UK: Council says sorry after security breach
Council chiefs have apologised after the National Insurance numbers of thousands of pension holders were disclosed. The NI numbers were printed in the address fields of 6,600 pension newsletters from Northumberland County Council and were clearly visible through the cellophane of the envelopes. Staff at the third-party mailing company used to send out the newsletters…
HMRC mails wrong private info to 50,000 19,000 taxpayers
John Oates reports on another black eye for HMRC: Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs apologised today for sending out private information to 50,000 tax credit recipients. One taxpayer who contacted The Register said: “We received our tax credit notice with our National Insurance details but on the back were two strangers’ work, childcare and pay…
PA: 2 Get Prison for Stealing ID’s of DUI Offenders
As a follow-up to a case previously reported here, Myles Snyder reports: Two Lancaster men will spend less than two years in prison for using the identities of drunken driving offenders in a identity theft scheme. John B. Spencer III, 29, was sentenced in federal court Wednesday to 21 months imprisonment followed by three years…
Ca: Shockingly easy to obtain confidential information
It seems you don’t need “friends in high places” to open doors for you in Saskatchewan. How about a humble data entry clerk? That’s apparently all it took for the Teamsters Union to obtain confidential personal information from the SGI [Saskatchewan Government Insurance] database which it then used to write to the home addresses of…
UPDATE: Missing hard drive recovered
Note: This May 17 press release from the Arkansas National Guard updates a breach previously covered on DataBreaches.net (here and here): CAMP JOSEPH T. ROBINSON, Ark. — The external hard drive containing personal information on over 32,000 current and former Arkansas Guardsmen that was reported missing on February 22 has now been recovered and destroyed….