Cheshire East Council has been ordered to pay a monetary penalty of £80,000 for failing to take appropriate measures to ensure the security and appropriateness of disclosure when emailing personal information, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said today. The serious breach of the Data Protection Act occurred in May 2011 when a council employee was…
Category: Non-U.S.
Firms prosecuted over welfare data
Elaine Edwards reports: Three large insurance companies have pleaded guilty to illegally using social welfare information on individuals which they obtained through a private investigator. FBD, Zurich and Travelers Insurance all pleaded guilty to 10 sample charges each after they were prosecuted for breaches of the Data Protection Act. The prosecutions followed a complaint from…
TicketWeb security breached by fake Adobe scammers
Carrie-Ann Skinner reports: TicketWeb has suffered a security breach which saw emails containing malicious links purporting to be from Adobe sent to its customers. On February 11 customers of the British ticketing site reported receiving up to four emails all with the subject ‘Action Required: Update Your PDF Application’. The email claimed that the recipient’s…
Microsoft Store hacked in India, passwords stored in plain text
Sean Buckley reports: Frequenters of India’s online Microsoft Store were briefly greeted with the suspicious visage of a Guy Fawkes mask this morning, following a hack that compromised the site’s user database. According toWPSauce, Microsoft Store India’s landing page was briefly taken over by a hacker group called Evil Shadow Team, who, in addition to putting a…
Brazzers pornography site forum broken into, hacker says more than 350,000 users’ data compromised
Ralph Satter of Associated Press reports a 17 year-old Moroccan who claims allegiance to Anonymous acquired personal information on 350,000 users of a popular pornography site by hacking into an older un-updated forum: A small sample of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of user data allegedly compromised were posted to the Internet earlier this…
CORR and UPDATE: Nl: E-mail via Dutch KPN suspended after data theft
From ExPatica: Hundreds of clients of Dutch telecomprovider KPN are still unable to use their e-mail accounts after servers at the company were hacked. Unknown digital intruders stole personal data such as user names, home addresses, phone numbers and bank account numbers. A list with the names of 500 KPN users was posted on file…