Catalin Cimpanu reports: The Swedish government has exposed sensitive details on millions of citizens in one of the biggest government screw-ups ever, and the official responsible for the whole fiasco was fined only half of her’s monthly salary, which is 70,000 Swedish krona — or around $8,500. The leak happened in September 2015, when the…
Category: Subcontractor
Wells Fargo Accidentally Releases Trove of Data on Wealthy Clients
Serge F. Kovaleski and Stacy Cowley report that external counsel for Wells Fargo Advisors appear to have over-responded to a discovery request by inadvertently including financial details on 50,000 Wells Fargo high-wealth clients: When a lawyer for Gary Sinderbrand, a former Wells Fargo employee, subpoenaed the bank as part of a defamation lawsuit against a…
D.C. District Court Expands Government Contractors’ Exposure to Consumer Data Breach Class Actions
Michael Breslin, Christian Henel, Jon Neiditz, and Gunjan Talati of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP write: The United States District Court for the District of Columbia recently endorsed private citizens bringing data breach claims directly against a government contractor where the contractor failed adequately to safeguard the citizens’ personal information. In McDowell v. CGI Federal…
Over 5 million Social Security numbers exposed in Kansas breach: report
Morgan Chalfant reports: A breach of a Kansas Department of Commerce system exposed more than 5 million Social Security numbers to hackers, according to a report from a local news outlet. The Kansas News Service obtained information through a public records request that revealed that roughly 5.5 million Social Security numbers from individuals in 10 states were…
Vendor Breached Your Company Data? Sorry, You’re Still Liable
Rhys Dipshan writes: Call it the summer of vendor security mishaps. In June, a data firm hired by the Republican National Committee inadvertently exposed the personal information of almost 200 million American voters by misconfiguring an Amazon cloud server. A month later, Verizon’s customer service vendor NICE Systems made the same mistake and exposed data…
Veterans Administration responds to Freedom of Information request; releases breach reports
So what did we miss because the Veterans Administration stopped posting their monthly breach reports to Congress on their web site? DataBreaches.net filed a Freedom of Information request on June 7, and the VA has responded by providing all of the requested monthly reports for the period May, 2016 – June 7, 2017. As an…