A follow-up to a breach reported on this blog (but not in the mainstream media) in November 2011: A property management firm will pay $15,000 in civil penalties following the theft of a laptop containing the personal information of over 600 Massachusetts residents, Attorney General Martha Coakley announced today. “It is incredibly important that businesses…
Category: Of Note
MilitarySingles.com hack exposes over 160,000 users’ information (updated to include ESingles denial of breach)
MilitarySingles.com has apparently been hacked. The hack was announced on Twitter earlier today by Operation Digiturk and a database of 163,792 names, usernames, e-mail addresses, IP addresses, and passwords has been dumped on the Internet. The tweet was accompanied by the hashtags #anonymous #antisec #infosec I don’t know if the site is aware of the hack and eSingles Inc.’s…
Commentary: ACC caught out in another privacy breach
It just goes from bad to worse at ACC (the Accident Compensation Corporation), it seems. I had previously noted reports of a serious breach involving thousands of individuals’ claims. Since the initial reports, more details have emerged that have made waves, but this newest report will have some just wanting to shut ACC down altogether….
Good news for breached entities: it won’t cost you as much and customers are less likely to leave – Ponemon study
The new Ponemon study, 2011 Cost of a Data Breach Study has some interesting findings. From the executive summary: The cost of a data breach declined. For the first time in seven years, both the organizational cost of data breach and the cost per lost or stolen record have declined. The organizational cost has declined from…
Police look into firm’s database of private info…. on 150 million! (updated)
We saw reports on some huge data breaches out of China last summer. Some of them, we learned, were not necessarily hacks but employees leaking data. Here’s another report of people allegedly behaving very badly. Xu Chi reports: Shanghai police are investigating a local company that reportedly illegally collected private information of more than 150…
HHS settles HIPAA case with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee for $1.5 million following theft of 57 computer drives
From HHS: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee (BCBST) has agreed to pay the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) $1,500,000 to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules, Leon Rodriguez, Director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR), announced today. BCBST…