Human Resources and Skills Development Canada seems to be vying for a spot on the wall of shame. Last month, they disclosed that an employee had lost an unencrypted USB drive with 5,000 Canadians’ social insurance numbers, medical records, and other information. Even normally mild-mannered and polite Canadians got upset over that one. Now today, when…
Category: Of Note
Global Payments revises total breach cost estimates upwards, but wait until you see what *didn’t* cost them
In September, I posted Global Payments’ statement from their quarterly filing that dealt with the costs of a breach disclosed in March 2012. BankInfoSecurity.com has just reported on their most recent filing. Whereas last year, Global Payments estimated the cost of the breach at about $84 million, their current 10-Q filing puts the cost of the…
Hit with extortion demand after job applicants’ data hacked, Drake International refuses to pay
Christine Dobby reports: Drake International, the Canadian-based job placement firm, confirmed Wednesday that it has been the victim of a hacking scheme by a group seeking to extort payment in exchange for not releasing the personal information of people who have used Drake’s services. […] The hackers that contacted Drake on Monday, made their threats…
No one’s to blame? I beg to disagree.
Another data theft in the education sector. And yet again, no one did anything wrong because there was never any policy. Yesterday I added a breach to DataLossDB involving the Morgan Road Middle School in Georgia. A flash drive with unencrypted student information, including SSNs, was stolen from an teacher’s unattended car. A gradebook was…
Shades of 2003: Have contractors started holding individuals’ PII hostage again?
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any report that a contractor or their employees were holding an organization’s client or patient data hostage as part of a dispute. To my surprise, however, there have been two such reports like that recently. One case is in the healthcare sector and I’ll be blogging about…
Inadequate security of personal, private, and sensitive Information in school districts’ mobile computing devices – audit
I’ve often pointed out my concerns that public schools – at least those in New York that I’ve been in – do not seem to have adequate security in place for the vast troves of sensitive and confidential information they collect and retain. So I was unsurprised to read that a recent Office of the…