Severin Carrell reports: Privacy and civil rights campaigners have urged the Scottish government to drop plans for a new identity database which could allow public bodies, including tax authorities, to share every adult’s private data. Scottish ministers have been accused of introducing a central database by stealth after civil servants quietly published plans to expand an NHS register…
Anthem says at least 8.8 million non-customers could be victims in data hack
Caroline Humer reports: Health insurer Anthem Inc, which earlier this month reported that it was hit by a massive cyberbreach, said on Tuesday that 8.8 million to 18.8 million people who were not its customers could be victims in the attack. Anthem, the country’s second-largest health insurer, is part of a national network of independently run…
UK: ICO fines Staysure after hacked card details used for fraud
There’s an update to a breach reported on this site in January 2014: An online holiday insurance company has been fined £175,000 by the ICO after IT security failings let hackers access customer records. More than 5,000 customers had their credit cards used by fraudsters after the attack on Staysure.co.uk. Attackers potentially had access to over 100,000…
AU: Police smash international identity-theft ring
Emma Partridge reports: Police have smashed an international identity-theft ring accused of making thousands of fake driver’s licences to fraudulently obtain loans and credit cards and board domestic flights. Three men and a woman were arrested in Sydney on Wednesday, eight months after officers detected a package from China containing 5000 NSW driver’s licence holograms….
Does Clapper Silence Data Breach Litigation? A Two-Year Retrospective
Andrew Hoffman writes: This February 26, 2015, marks the two-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA,[1] which required plaintiffs to allege that a threatened injury is “certainly impending” in order to constitute an injury-in-fact sufficient to convey Article III standing. In this time, federal district courts in at least twelve data…
Police probe video of possible data hack at the National Archives
Did hackers access protected data at the National Archives or didn’t they? It’s not clear, as Elise Viebeck and Cory Bennett report: The National Archives acknowledged Wednesday that it has alerted law enforcement to a suspicious video posted online by hackers who purport to have gained access to agency files. Released on YouTube earlier this month,…