California Virtual Academies (CAVA) is a network of 11 publicly funded charter k-12 schools in California. Researcher Chris Vickery recently contacted DataBreaches.net after he found a database with 58,694 of their students’ records leaking. In addition to a lot of personal information on the students that was all in plain text, the leaking data included some information on student…
Category: Of Note
Small-Scale Violations of Medical Privacy Often Cause the Most Harm
Note: the following article was reported by Charles Ornstein of ProPublica, Dec. 10, 2015, 5 a.m. and is reproduced under Creative Commons license. Although Ornstein did not mention it in his reporting, the case of Tami Matteson was previously covered on this site in 2013 in a post entitled ” ‘Small’ breach, big harm.” In that article,…
Wyndham caves, settles charges with FTC (updated)
I did not see this coming. Wyndham has settled FTC charges, bringing an end to a closely watched court case involving FTC’s authority to enforce data security. The case was the first one that hadn’t resulted in a consent order. Today’s settlement leaves only the LabMD as a challenge to FTC’s authority to enforce data…
NullCrew hacker pleads guilty
Jon Seidel reports that NullCrew member Timothy J. French pleaded guilty this morning in federal court in Chicago. NullCrew’s attacks on Bell Canada, University of Virginia, Spokeo, Comcast, and other entities have been covered in the past on this site (search NullCrew), and many of NullCrew’s “Fuck the System!” newsletters and YouTube videos remain available online. During one…
CNIL Fines Optical Center for Data Security Violations
Sara Susnjar writes: The French data protection authority (CNIL) recently announced in its decision against Optical Center, a French retailer of eyewear and other optical products, that it was fined €50,000 for violations related to security and confidentiality of its customers’ personal data. The fine is based on the CNIL’s audit of the company’s processing activities….
Personal data of Dutch telecom providers extremely poorly protected: how I could access 12+ million records #phonehousegate
Words fail. Just read this post by Sijmen Ruwhof.