From the what-the-HELL-were-they-thinking department: A former local authority education worker who illegally shared personal information about schoolchildren and their parents has been prosecuted. Samira Bouzkraoui, 24, took a screenshot of a council spreadsheet concerning children and their eligibility for free school meals before sending it to the estranged parent of one of the pupils via…
Category: Of Note
Supreme Court denies CareFirst’s petition to review data breach case
Evan Sweeney reports: The U.S. Supreme Court has denied an appeal filed by CareFirst to review a case stemming from a 2014 data breach. The Supreme Court issued its decision on Tuesday, eliminating the possibility, for now, that the court will weigh in on questions about whether the possibility of harm from a data breach is…
Phishing schemes net hackers millions of dollars from Fortune 500
Charlie Osborne reports: Fortune 500 companies are losing millions of dollars due to new and sophisticated phishing scams conducted by cyberattackers, IBM has discovered. On Wednesday, researchers from IBM’s X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) team said the Business Email Compromise (BEC) scheme is currently active and is successfully targeting Accounts Payable (AP) teams…
Half A Million People Don’t Know Criminals Stole Their Identities to Get Jobs
Jack Corrigan reports: A programming error kept the IRS from notifying hundreds of thousands of identity theft victims about criminals using their Social Security numbers to get themselves jobs in 2017, according to an internal investigation. Last year, more than half a million Americans had their identities used by others to get hired, but only…
Update on Colorado’s Proposed Privacy and Cybersecurity Legislation
David M. Stauss and Gregory Szewczyk of Ballard Spahr LLP write: As we first reported in our January 22, 2018, alert, the Colorado legislature is considering legislation that, if enacted, would significantly change Colorado privacy and data security law. On Wednesday, February 14, 2018, the bill’s sponsors submitted an amended bill that addresses issues raised by numerous stakeholders, including Ballard…
A Hacker Has Wiped a Spyware Company’s Servers—Again
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports: Last year, a vigilante hacker broke into the servers of a company that sells spyware to everyday consumers and wiped their servers, deleting photos captured from monitored devices. A year later, the hacker has done it again. Thursday, the hacker said he started wiping some cloud servers that belong to Retina-X Studios,…