From an editorial in Ham&High in the UK: Personal details of 9,000 school pupils in Barnet have been stolen from the home of a council employee, bosses have announced. In breach of the council’s policy the employee took home 20 unauthorised and unencrypted CDs and memory sticks full of the children’s details including names, dates…
Category: Non-U.S.
UK: Foster files left in street on unencrypted USB
Confidential information held by social services about children in care has been found on a pavement by a passer-by. Dozens of sensitive Stoke-on-Trent City Council documents were discovered on a memory stick left in Potteries Way, Hanley, yesterday. The social services records of foster carers, family court proceedings, parenting assessments, child custody arrangements and the…
(follow-up) St Albans City and District Council takes action after voters’ details stolen
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has found St Albans City and District Council in breach of the Data Protection Act. A laptop was stolen which was used to store postal voters’ records as part of an election process in June 2009. The personal information, which was password protected but unencrypted, remained on the laptop when…
Thousands of stolen bank account numbers seized in Ontario
Karen Mullins reports: Police have seized thousands of bank account numbers stolen by an identity theft ring and charged six people with 80 criminal offences. Durham Regional Police and the Ontario Provincial Police have been working almost a year to bust up an ATM tampering ring in an operation dubbed Project Kaiser. […] During the…
(follow-up) Auction Slammed Over Data Theft
In preparing this site’s Top 10 biggest breaches list, I had noted that there were conflicting reports about a 2008 breach involving the Korea unit of eBay. The breach was back in the news recently as a court held that Auction was not liable. Now it’s back in the news yet again with reports that…
Western Australia’s Auditor General Finds Serious Weaknesses in Government Agencies’ Handling of Information
In his annual report on Information System Management in state government agencies, the Auditor General for Western Australia has identified serious weaknesses in the way many agencies manage their IT systems. The two-part Information Systems Audit Report, tabled in Parliament, found that government agencies were often failing to implement comprehensive controls over their IT systems…