Xinhua reports: Chinese police caught over 4,200 suspects for theft of personal information in 2016, with over 1,800 cases solved, according to the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). The police also managed to track more than 30 billion stolen personal information items last year, while nearly 100 of the suspects were hackers. Read more on…
Category: Non-U.S.
Great news Australia: We’ve had our first metadata breach
Claire Reilly and Luke Lancaster report: Chalk this one up for the security record books under the chapter titled, “We told you so.” Australia has its first (reported) metadata breach. And it came at the hands of an Australian Federal Police officer. The AFP today revealed one of its officers “illegally” accessed the metadata of…
Sg: National University of Singapore educates students on protecting their information
Channel NewsAsia reports: The National University of Singapore (NUS) has to put in place an e-training module for all its students on personal data protection, after it emerged that the personal particulars of 143 student volunteers were breached in 2016. In a press statement on Friday (Apr 28), an NUS spokesperson said a URL link…
AU: Privacy breach costs $23,000 – but could have been worse
Alison Baker and Rhiannon Nixon of Hall & Wilcox write: The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has ordered Comcare to pay a Defence Force employee $23,000 after it inadvertently published on its website personal information, including sensitive health information, about the employee. For organisations with obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), this…
UK: Privacy breach at Gloucestershire County Council exposed medical information online
When hacktivist @ElSurveillance recently tweeted that 14 government sites had the same vulnerabilities, including MYSQL, Cross Site Script, etc., someone responded that councils were generally not considered “government.” DataBreaches.net had – and will continue to – consider them “government” entities, as local government is still government. And in this site’s experience, council breaches can involve sensitive information,…
UK: Two plead guilty to 2015 TalkTalk data breach
Shaun Nichols reports the latest on the 2015 TalkTalk hack: Two chaps in the UK have admitted stealing more than 150,000 customer records from TalkTalk. Matthew Hanley, 22, and Connor Douglass Allsopp, 20, both from Tamworth, copped to charges in connection to the 2015 attack on the broadband ISP’s systems and subsequent attempts to sell people’s…