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,…
Category: Government Sector
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…
Soldiers’ Data Still Being Downloaded Overseas, Firm Says
Ellen Nakashima reports: The personal data of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers — including those in the Special Forces — continue to be downloaded by unauthorized computer users in countries such as China and Pakistan, despite Army assurances that it would try to fix the problem, according to a private firm that monitors cybersecurity….
Probe Targets Archives’ Handling of Data on 70 Million Vets
Ryan Singel reports: The inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration is investigating a potential data breach of tens of million of records about U.S. military veterans, after the agency sent a defective hard drive back to its vendor for repair and recycling without first destroying the data. At issue is a hard…