Embarrassing reminders about the South Carolina Department of Revenue (SCDOR) breach continue. The Associated Press reports on testimony in yesterday’s hearing by the state’s House oversight panel: Revenue has been criticized for not using the state information technology division’s computer monitoring services — which are offered but not required — before the hacking. While the…
Category: U.S.
Global Payments revises total breach cost estimates upwards, but wait until you see what *didn’t* cost them
In September, I posted Global Payments’ statement from their quarterly filing that dealt with the costs of a breach disclosed in March 2012. BankInfoSecurity.com has just reported on their most recent filing. Whereas last year, Global Payments estimated the cost of the breach at about $84 million, their current 10-Q filing puts the cost of the…
GA: Personal Info Left on City Computer Hard Drives Sold to Computer Repair Shop
Andrew Reeser reports: A computer repair shop in Macon that bought used computers from a government auction site says the ones they were sold had personal information of city employees still in the hard drives. A police report says BC Computer Repair in Macon bought the computers on govdeals.com in 2011. Then, on January 5th…
No one’s to blame? I beg to disagree.
Another data theft in the education sector. And yet again, no one did anything wrong because there was never any policy. Yesterday I added a breach to DataLossDB involving the Morgan Road Middle School in Georgia. A flash drive with unencrypted student information, including SSNs, was stolen from an teacher’s unattended car. A gradebook was…
When is “an excess of caution” not excessive?
Over on DataLossDB.org, I was entering a security breach notification sent by Atlanta-based Oldcastle APG, Inc. They had informed the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office that a laptop containing over 5,000 employees’ names, Social Security numbers, and bank account information had been stolen from an employee’s car. As required by the state. they had attached a…
Former IT security manager for SCDOR testifies about the lack of security controls prior to its breach
Jeffrey Collins of Associated Press reports: The Department of Revenue was more concerned with keeping employees from accessing news, sports and social media websites on their work computers than protecting taxpayer data like Social Security numbers, a former computer security chief at the agency said Thursday. Read more on Aiken Standard. Tim Smith of Greenville…