Ethan Baron reports: Data thieves used a massive “botnet” against professional networking site LinkedIn and stole member’s personal information, a new lawsuit reveals. The Mountain View firm filed the federal suit this week in an attempt to uncover the perpetrators. “LinkedIn members populate their profiles with a wide range of information concerning their professional lives, including summaries (narratives…
Category: U.S.
Proposed class action over CareFirst data breach dismissed
Brendan Pierson reports: A federal judge has dismissed a proposed class action over a 2015 cyberattack against health insurance company CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield that compromised the data of about 1.1 million people. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C. ruled Wednesday that the CareFirst policyholders who brought the lawsuit had not shown that they…
Three TheDarkOverlord incidents appear on HHS’s public breach tool
Quick note to point out that three of TheDarkOverlord’s victims have reported their breaches to HHS, although the numbers they report do not always match what had been claimed by TDO and previously reported in the media: Midwest Orthopedic Pain and Spine reported that 29,153 patients (not 48,000) were affected; Athens Orthopedic Clinic reported that 201,000…
Walgreens avoids penalty after 9-year privacy breach investigation
I have been following this case from the beginning and wondering why the heck HHS didn’t come down on Walgreens like they did on their competitors CVS and RiteAid. And now we learn that OCR just closed the case with no penalty? Seriously? So CVS and RiteAid get clobbered by both the FTC and HHS/OCR, and Walgreens…….
Personal information for hundreds of people found along CLE roadside
NewsNet5 in Cleveland reports: The City of Cleveland is trying to determine who dumped the personal information of hundreds of northeast Ohio residents along the roadside on Train Avenue. The personal information was strewn along a mile stretch of roadway, at five different dumping sites, and included; tax returns, mortgage information, canceled checks, addresses, social…
What HHS may not do, a state might
Back in June, 2014, this site noted two breaches disclosed by Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego that involved patient data being disclosed to job applicants. Later that month, we learned that in the process of investigating the two known breaches, Rady uncovered two more such breaches. Rady duly notified HHS in June, 2014. More than two years later, there…