King’s College London fell afoul of the Data Protection Act, it seems. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) learned that a spreadsheet containing personal data -including exam results – of 1831 students and applicants was sent in error to 22 students. Of note, the spreadsheet had been worked on by and transferred between several employees prior to being sent out…
Category: Non-U.S.
European Central Bank website hacked, extortion attempt
(Update: as a commenter kindly points out to me, this breach was from last July, not this one!) BBC reports: The website of the European Central Bank (ECB) has been hacked, with personal information stolen. The hacker demanded money for stolen data, which included contact information for people who had registered for events at the…
UK: FoI reveals scale of financial data loss
Tessa Norman reports on the results of a freedom of information request filed with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the U.K.: Incidents reported to the regulator include a consumer credit firm which lost in transit a server containing customer details, affecting 5 million people. The regulator informed the Information Commissioner’s Office of the incident….
AU: Labor lobbyist Hawker Britton makes embarrassing email error
Daisy Dumas reports: It is the oldest PR mistake in the book — and possibly the last thing an already weakened Labor Party ally needs. Labor-aligned federal government lobbying firm Hawker Britton has accidentally revealed its contacts database in an email sent on Thursday afternoon. The message was sent to to more than 1000 email addresses,…
Ontario hit with hundreds of privacy-breach complaints
Richard J. Brennan reports: Ontario has been hit with more than 200 privacy complaints about the mishandling of personal information by the provincial government or its agencies over the past 18 months, according to the information and privacy commissioner. Most of them can be chalked up to human error or computer glitches, but the common thread in…
Homeplus execs and employees illegally sold 24m customers’ info: prosecutors
South Korea has had some major breaches involving consumer information that I’ve reported on over the past years. Here’s a report from Yonhap News that mentions a breach I seem to have missed, though: In February, Homeplus Co., the South Korean unit of British retail giant Tesco PLC, was also indicted on charges of illegally selling…