Stephanie Porter-Nichols reports: A Smyth County grand jury indicted a 40-year-old Chilhowie woman Wednesday for distributing the names, salaries and Social Security numbers of hundreds of General Dynamics’ employees in the midst of a strike last spring. In Smyth County Circuit Court, the felony indictment was handed down for Melissa H. Trail. The indictment charged…
Category: Other
EPIC asks FTC to investigate Google’s cloud computing security
Alexei Oreskovic of Reuters reports that EPIC has asked the FTC to investigate the adequacy of Google’s cloud computing security after a problem resulted in unintended file sharing last month. EPIC’s request (pdf) includes Gmail, Google Docs, and Picasa.
University of Florida: “starting to have…. quite a reputation”
Nathan Crabbe of The Gainesville Sun reports that in addition to the breaches that recently made the news, UF has had four cases of ID theft resulting from breaches. During a committee meeting of university trustees at which they passed federal rules intended to prevent identity theft, UF Chief Privacy Officer Susan Blair described the…
Police in Romania detain 20 alleged hackers
The Associated Press reports that police in Romania have detained 20 people suspected of cloning the web sites of banks in other countries to deplete customers’ bank accounts. Individuals in both Spain and Italy were affected. In another case, police detained a person suspected of hacking into the servers of U.S. universities and government agencies,…
Rental Research Services, Inc. settles FTC charges that it sold credit reports to ID thieves
Rental Research Services, Inc. , a consumer reporting agency, and its principal, Lee Mikkelson, settled FTC charges that they failed to properly screen prospective customers and sold at least 318 credit reports to identity thieves. Under the settlement, the company and its principal must ensure that they provide credit reports only to legitimate businesses for…
Rogue app ruins Facebook’s weekend
Social networks Facebook and MySpace were dealing with new security issues on Friday that could compromise personal information and communications from friends. […] One of the problems is that Facebook allows anybody to write an application, and third-party applications are not vetted before they are made available to the public. So, even as Facebook stamps…