You know all those monetary penalties HHS generally doesn’t hand out? Well, the state of California does when it enforces Section 1280.15 of the California Health and Safety Code. Earlier this year, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) announced it had issued monetary penalties this year to the following hospitals after investigations into privacy breaches. Links below…
Google Vietnam hacked and defaced by Lizard Squad
Vijay reports: The infamous band of hackers, Lizard Squad today hacked and defaced Google Vietnam’s home page. The attack started at around 12.00 pm Vietnam time and many Internet users in Vietnam were unable to get access to google.com.vn. The defaced screen showed a image of a teenager holding a iPhone and a video along with…
IL: Midlothian cops pay ransom to retrieve data from hacker
Gregory Pratt reports: A south suburban police department paid a $500 ransom to an unidentified hacker to regain access to data from a police computer the hacker managed to disable, records show. Midlothian in January was hit with a form of computer virus called Cryptoware, said Calvin Harden Jr., an IT vendor who works with…
K-State assistant professor: Computer hackers have value in society
Roy Wenzl reports: Kevin Steinmetz, a criminologist at Kansas State University, has studied and met a lot of hackers and he sees value in them. Hacker culture is far more diverse, more interesting, more valuable and more sophisticated than most of us realize, he said. […] His latest work, “An Ethnographic Study of Hacking,” has…
Ca: Cyberattack at NRC occurred weeks before alert sent out
Susan Lunn reports: The federal government was aware a hacker had stolen secret information from the National Research Council last summer for at least three weeks before it notified stakeholders, employees and the public. That warning went out on July 29, 2014, a day after news of the hacking incident first broke in the news media….
Ca: Data breach findings in limbo since 2012, legislature hears
Cindy E. Harnett reports: More than two years after the B.C. government said it was forwarding the findings of its 2012 Health Ministry privacy breach investigation to the RCMP, the police said they had yet to receive it. An RCMP officer in the federal serious and organized crime unit asked the B.C. government in November when…