Pat Reavy reports: A state employee was charged Wednesday with illegally getting into his co-worker’s computer, changing her Facebook password and reading her messages. Eric Brian Thompson, 42, of Farmington, is charged in 3rd District Court with computer fraud, a third-degree felony. In May of 2016, Thompson was an employee of the state of Utah,…
Category: U.S.
UGA student accused of hacking account to change grades
Joe Johnson reports: A University of Georgia student is facing 80 felony counts for allegedly hacking into a professor’s computer to change his grades. Michael Lamon Williams, 21, was booked into the Clarke County Jail Wednesday on nine counts of computer trespass and 71 counts of computer forgery. Williams, a student of UGA’s Terry College…
Western Union Customer Data Stolen – Company Blames an Unnamed Storage Firm
Rafia Shaikh reports: Trusted Western Union with your money? It appears the company may have lost your information to hackers. While the company talks about testing transactions with Ripple and expects higher sales in 2018, it seems it’s having some troubles with security. Some of the Western Union consumers started receiving a letter from the…
Etsy Discloses Tax-Related Privacy Breach
Ina Steiner reports: Etsy confirmed a privacy breach impacted about 1,500 sellers. The incident was caused by human error and was not related to any hacking or website vulnerability. The incident occurred on January 30, 2018, when an Etsy seller requested a copy of their 2016 federal 1099 tax form. Etsy sent a letter to…
Unsecured server exposed thousands of FedEx customer records
Zack Whittaker reports: FedEx has exposed private information belonging to thousands of its customers after a legacy server was left open without a password. The discovery was made by security researchers at the Kromtech Security Center, which posted details of the exposure alongside ZDNet. The data, hosted on a password-less Amazon S3 storage server, was…
Russian hackers involved in largest hacking scheme ever prosecuted in U.S. sentenced
Vladimir Drinkman, the Russian hacker indicted and extradited as part of what was the largest hacking case of its time, was sentenced yesterday to 12 years in prison by a federal judge in New Jersey. Drinkman had pleaded guilty in 2015 to conspiring to hack firms including Heartland Payment Systems Inc., 7-Eleven, and Hannaford Bros., and Jet Blue. Dmitriy Smilianets,…