Valencia College is apologizing after a mistake allowed the personal information of 9,000 current and prospective students to be posted online. The school said an Excel spreadsheet with the students’ names, address, date of birth, and student IDs was listed online on a password-protected website. Eventually, it lost its password protection, which means anyone could…
Category: U.S.
Follow-up: Spammers abusing DreamHost sites following January hack
Lucian Constantin reports a follow-up to a January breach involving DreamHost: The security breach suffered by DreamHost in January has resulted in hundreds of rogue PHP pages redirecting users to work-at-home scams, according to researchers from cloud security vendor Zscaler. Read more on ComputerworldUK.
Tablet snafu: Motorola says not all data wiped from refurbished devices
Lorene Yue reports: Usually, when passwords and personal information are exposed, it’s because someone hacked a company’s not-so-secure system. Motorola, however, managed to put people’s info at risk without such malfeasance when it failed to wipe the memory of a batch of refurbished Xooms. The tablets in question were sold by Woot.com between October and…
Follow-up: Man gets seven years in prison for Navy credit card scam
Here’s a follow-up to a breach previously noted on this blog: Tim McGlone reports that the leader of a credit card skimming operation who enlisted an employee of McDonald’s on Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia was sentenced today to seven years in federal prison. Read more on The Virginian-Pilot. Thanks to Information Privacy Professionals for…
SLC Police Department hack: hackers delete their own files after reiterating pledge not to expose residents’ personal info
Hacktivism raises all kinds of ethical issues. In an unusual move, hackers responsible for the hack of the Salt Lake City Police Department have deleted their copies of some of the files they had acquired from the PD’s web site. In announcing the hack on Tuesday, the hackers known as Kahuna and CabinCr3w indicated that…
Why Are We Only Finding Out About the VeriSign Security Breach Now?
Keith Wagstaff gives voice to the question many of us were asking yesterday, “Why Are We Only Finding Out About the VeriSign Security Breach Now?” Read his commentary on Time.