Nicole Perlroth and Mike Isaac report: “Hello Joe,” read the November 2016 email from someone identifying himself as “John Doughs.” “I have found a major vulnerability in Uber.” The email appeared to be no different from other messages that Joe Sullivan, Uber’s chief security officer, and his team routinely received through the company’s “bug bounty”…
Category: Of Note
The Coca-Cola Breach and Who’s on Hook for Security of Employee Data
Chris Opfer writes: Six years after Shane Enslin left his repairman job at a Coca-Cola distribution plant in Pennsylvania, the company told him that his Social Security number and other personal information might have fallen into the wrong hands. A few months later, a declined credit card upended his family vacation. Then came a third…
House Passes Cyber Vulnerability Disclosure Reporting Act
Jennifer Martin and Calvin Cohen write: On January 9, the House of Representatives passed the Cyber Vulnerability Disclosure Reporting Act by voice vote. The Act directs the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) to prepare a report describing the policies and procedures that DHS developed to coordinate the cyber vulnerability disclosures. Under…
Website operators are in the dark about privacy violations by third-party scripts
by Steven Englehardt, Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan Recently we revealed that “session replay” scripts on websites record everything you do, like someone looking over your shoulder, and send it to third-party servers. This en-masse data exfiltration inevitably scoops up sensitive, personal information — in real time, as you type it. We released the data…
Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences notifying 280,000 Medicaid patients after hack
Oof. Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences is notifying 279,865 Medicaid patients of a hacking incident. Here is the notice from OSU’s web site: Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences (OSUCHS) takes the privacy and security of our patients’ information very seriously. Regrettably, this notice is regarding an incident in which some Medicaid patient information…
New Event of Note: International Privacy+Security Forum: Feb. 26 and Feb. 27
One of the absolute joys of blogging about privacy and breaches for the last 11+ years is that I’ve had the opportunity to meet so many fantastic scholars and practitioners. But I’ve only had that opportunity because a few people have done the hard work to organize events and to graciously offer to comp me so…