Emily Watkins of Northern Territory News reports that a man who was drunk and upset over the breakup with his fiancee hacked into the government system using her password and deleted 10,475 accounts from the Health Department, hospital, prison and Supreme Court servers. It reportedly took 130 experts to find the problem and fix it,…
Category: Government Sector
Army database may have been breached
Doug Beizer of Federal Computer Week reports that an Army database containing personal information about nearly 1,600 soldiers involved with the Operation Tribute to Freedom program during the past five years may have been accessed by unauthorized users. The potentially compromised information does not include Social Security numbers, but does include names, phone numbers, addresses,…
UK: Children’s details published on website in council blunder
Annie Riddle of The Salisbury Journal reports that 146 special needs (i.e., special education) children had their personal details published on a Wiltshire County Council website. What makes this one worse is that the council had been alerted to the problem in 2004 and thought it had been taken care of back then. Two weeks…
Minnesota agency accidentally reveals personal info of employees
Politics in Minnesota reports that the Minnesota Management and Budget (MMB) accidentally revealed employees’ home towns instead of “town of duty station” in response to a freedom of information law request that also requested state employees’ name, salary, job title, and agency. The information was posted to a web site by whoever had requested it,…
Lost or Missing in the UK
Brian Meechan of BBC Wales reports that in 2007, a CD with the personal details of more than 2,300 crime victims was lost in the post by Gwent Police, but none of those affected were ever notified because the police decided that the data could not be accessed. The CD had been password-protected, but the…
HK: Privacy Commissioner to investigate police data leakage
As a follow-up to what appears to be one toomany file-sharing leaks, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data has ordered an investigation.