Miguel Helft and John Markoff report: Google threatened late Tuesday to pull out of its operations in China after it said it had uncovered a massive cyber attack on its computers that originated there. As a result, the company said, it would no longer agree to censor its search engine in China and may exit…
Category: Of Note
New Chinese Tort Liability Law Contains Provisions Affecting Personal Data
Hunton & Williams provide more details on the newly passed Chinese tort law: Certain of its provisions relate, expressly or in a general sense, to personal information. These provisions can cause data users to incur liability to data subjects for the mishandling of personal information. In particular: The law (at Articles 2 and 6) states…
Nineteen Indicted in Massive Cybercrime Conspiracy
Some readers may remember news reports in early 2009 about a raid on Core IP in Dallas. At the time, Matthew Simpson, CEO of Core IP, issued a statement that the raid related to the activities of a former customer. A number of bloggers and civil libertarians responded sympathetically to what they thought was an…
Hacking Takes Lead as Top Cause of Data Breaches
Hacking has topped human error as the top cause of reported data breaches for the first time since such tracking began in 2007, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center’s 2009 Breach Report. In its report, titled “Data Breaches: The Insanity Continues,” the non-profit ITRC found that 19.5 percent of reported breaches were due to…
Heartland in $60 mln settlement agreement with Visa
Reuters is reporting: Heartland Payment Systems Inc (HPY.N) said it reached a $60 million settlement agreement with Visa Inc (V.N), under which it will pay issuers of Visa-branded credit and debit cards for data security breach claims. Heartland, the fifth-largest payments processor in the United States, said the settlement was with respect to losses issuers…
Hackers May Have Unearthed Dirt on Stanford
Brian Krebs writes: In early 2008, while federal investigators were busy investigating disgraced financier Robert Allen Stanford for his part in an alleged $8 billion fraudulent investment scheme, Eastern European hackers were quietly hoovering up tens of thousands customer financial records from the Bank of Antigua, an institution formerly owned by the Stanford Group. […]…