Justin Penrose reports: A jailed hacker shut down a prison’s entire computer system – after bosses gave him the job of programming it. Douglas Havard, 27, serving six years for stealing up to £6.5million using forged credit cards over the internet, was approached after governors wanted to create an internal TV station but needed a…
Category: Of Note
Judge orders Google to deactivate user’s Gmail account, but wait, there’s more…
Wendy Davis reports that in the Rocky Mountain Bank case previously covered here: In a highly unusual move, a federal judge has ordered Google to deactivate the email account of a user who was mistakenly sent confidential financial information by a bank. The order, issued Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge James Ware in the…
Second blow for Bolton as company is banned
In a follow-up to a case where a data breach has had massive consequences for the breached entity, Mark Hawthorne reports that Nicholas Bolton lost another round in court in Australia when the court affirmed a decision by the Australian Domain Name Administrator (AuDA) banning Bottle Domains from selling or administering domain names: In January…
Hacker hits UNC-Chapel Hill study data
From McClatchy Newspapers: A hacker has infiltrated a computer server housing the personal data of 236,000 women enrolled in a UNC-Chapel Hill research study. Among the information exposed: the Social Security numbers of 163,000 study participants. Though the intrusion was detected in late July, computer forensics experts say it may have happened two years ago,…
Man who misused commercial database sentenced to prison
As a follow-up to a case previously noted here, Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph J. Marra, Jr. announced that a Queens, N.Y., man was sentenced to 141 months in federal prison today for supplying Social Security numbers to members of an identity fraud ring. U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton also ordered Yomi Jagunna, 44, to…
Laptop with some of Madoff victims’ data stolen
It just seems to get worse and worse for Bernie Madoff’s victims. Now AlixPartners, the court-appointed claims agent for the liquidation of Bemard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC reports (pdf) that in late July, a laptop computer of theirs was stolen from an employee’s locked vehicle. The laptop contained historical information from 1995 and earlier…