On Tuesday, Lorillard Tobacco notified the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office that its benefits consultant, Towers Watson, had notified the company that two DVDs containing employee data were lost in transit on or about February 2. Lorillard’s Vice-President of Human Resources, William G. Crump, explained: The package was lost after being picked up from the…
Category: U.S.
Blue Cross Mistake Releases Personal Info of 12K Members
From the press release: Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island (BCBSRI) today announced that personal information belonging to approximately 12,000 BlueCHiP for Medicare members was inadvertently contained in a filing cabinet donated with other surplus office furniture to a local nonprofit organization. The filing cabinet mistakenly contained completed BlueCHiP for Medicare Health Surveys…
95 new breaches in 2010 that didn’t make the news
The good folks over at the Identity Theft Resource Center recently posted a very gracious thank-you to me and this site for helping track data breaches. I suspect that they’ll be pulling their hair out this weekend, though. 🙂 In addition to the 100 previously unreported breaches from 2009 that I posted here today, here…
100 more breaches you probably never knew about in 2009
As noted here and elsewhere, the number of breaches reported in the media and other sources declined in 2009 relative to 2008, but newly obtained data suggests that once again, there was much that we did not know. During the period September 1 – December 31, 2009, 141 breach reports were received by the…
NY’s Higher Education Services Corp had its own breach last year
In discussing the huge Educational Credit Management Corp data breach previously covered on this site, Rick Karlin of the Times Union mentions a second and unrelated breach, this one by New York’s Higher Education Services Corp: [The breach] happened back in December when 1,433 e-mails from HESC ran into a “process error” by which the…
Boy, 9, accused of hacking into Fairfax schools’ computer system
Tom Jackman reports: Are you smarter than a third-grader? Because the online education system used by the Fairfax County public schools apparently is not. Police say a 9-year-old McLean boy hacked into the Blackboard Learning System used by the county school system to change teachers’ and staff members’ passwords, change or delete course content, and…