Justin Penrose reports: A convict phoned a prison officer at his home and threatened to kill him after confidential details of hundreds of warders fell into the hands of lags. Inmates got the names, addresses and National Insurance numbers of the officers when they were given the job of moving rubbish sacks. The threatened warder…
Category: Government Sector
Former Lambeth police officer accused of tipping off criminals is given caution
Guardian reports: A former Lambeth cop accused of leaking information to criminals has been given a police caution. The officer, who was suspected of tipping off criminal suspects about incriminating evidence against them, was cautioned on Tuesday for offences under the Data Protection Act. The then detective constable, who police will not name or reveal…
Audit of DRS data breach completed
Patricia Daddona reports: An audit of a 2007 data breach of state taxpayer’s personal information on a stolen laptop shows the state took too long to address the situation but has since made strides to prevent future incidents. Two years ago, some 106,000 Connecticut taxpayers’ names and Social Security numbers were compromised when an employee,…
Private info found in county Dumpster
Kari Cobham reports: Every 10 years, Flagler County’s building department purges its files. Only this time, county employees dumped about 15 boxes of applications, deeds, notices and plans in the trash — some of which included residents’ driver’s license and Social Security numbers. “We did wrong; it is a mistake we made,” County Administrator Craig…
City admits lapse in data release
Sewell Chan reports: On Tuesday, New York City rolled out the next phase of its NYC BigApps competition, an initiative that will supply local programmers and developers with a stockpile of raw municipal data sets to build applications for the Web and mobile phones. But in what appears to have been an accidental data breach,…
Computer crime case dropped
Here’s a case where it sounds like sloppy security may have led to unwarranted criminal charges. Annmarie Timmins reports: The authorities have dropped their theft and computer crime case against a former Local Government Center employee because the center’s “careless” and “sloppy” security practices would undermine any charges, according to letters obtained from the Merrimack…