Judi Hasson reports: There are so many data breaches throughout government these days that it’s getting tiresome. The question is why do they keep happening? Last week, the Government Accountability Office disclosed another one–this time from the Defense Department. The GAO revealed that DoD could not account for more than 72,000 health questionnaires that were…
Category: Government Sector
SC: Social Security, county bank account numbers accidentally made public
Copies of a report into past Anderson County finances, released to the public last week, contained Social Security numbers for two people, business tax identification numbers for two companies and three active county bank account numbers. The nearly 1,000-page report is still available for viewing at the historic courthouse in downtown Anderson but the sensitive…
Ca: Hacker put farmers’ records at risk
Bill Curry reports: An amateur hacker attacked two government servers at Agriculture Canada, putting at risk about 60,000 personal-data records of Canadian farmers, according to the Privacy Commissioner’s annual report. The report lists various privacy breaches that came to the Commissioner’s attention over the past year, but Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said she was at a…
Follow-up: B.C. privacy czar to probe files breach
Rob Shaw and Lindsay Kines report: B.C.’s privacy commissioner has launched his own investigation into how sensitive information from 1,400 income-assistance clients ended up at the home of a government employee. Information and Privacy Commissioner David Loukidelis said he has tough questions for the provincial government, including how the employee, a government case worker, was…
Personal records of 1,400 residents found in B.C. government employee’s home
Lindsay Kines and Rob Shaw report: The British Columbia government is investigating a major security breach after police discovered the personal records of 1,400 income-assistance clients in the home of a government employee, the Victoria Times Colonist has learned. The records covered a period from December 2006 to April 2007 and included names, addresses, birth…
NE: Hackers Breach State Database
A hacker has broken into the Nebraska Worker’s Compensation database, prompting an FBI investigation and an effort to contact those who may be affected. Several thousand people could be affected by the breach, which was discovered last week when the state’s chief information officer noticed an unusual amount of Internet traffic traversing the Worker’s Compensation…