Jennifer Pierce of News6 reports that an employee of the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission lost a flash drive with personal information, including Social Security numbers and payroll information, on 5,500 state employees. The employee had transferred the data to a flash drive after his laptop had become infected, and then lost the flash drive at…
Category: Lost or Missing
FairPoint probes on security breach
FairPoint Communications Inc. says a worker’s failure to abide by security precautions caused a portable data-storage device containing employee information to disappear from an undisclosed FairPoint office. The device contained information for all current FairPoint employees and some former employees, or about 4,400 individuals in total. Such data may have included names, home addresses and…
(Follow-up) UK: ICO takes enforcement action against the British Council for serious data breach
As a follow-up to an incident reported in January: The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has found the British Council in breach of the Data Protection Act after the loss of an unencrypted computer disc. Details lost include sensitive personal information relating to trade union membership of over 2,000 members of staff. The British Council reported…
(Follow-up) UK: Human error blamed for data loss
A health trust did not take adequate steps to prevent the loss of a memory stick with data on 6,360 prisoners and ex-prisoners, a report has said. The USB stick was being used to back up clinical databases at HMP Preston when it was lost on 30 December. A report found that human error was…
UK: Second data blunder fear
It’s amazing what you don’t find when you finally get around to looking for it. In this story out of the UK, a local council brought in consultants after one data breach, only to discover that their potential problem was bigger than they thought: …. Charnwood Borough Council admitted it could not find nine missing…
HK: Lost flash drive with patient data wasn’t password-protected
Adele Wong of The Standard reports that the Hospital Authority has been urged to improve security to avoid further losses of patients’ records following another incident involving a lost flash drive with unencrypted data. In this most recent incident, a physician from the obstetrics and gynecology department at United Christian Hospital misplaced a USB flash…