An update to the breach previously noted in April. Now we know it was an insider breach. Priyanka Dayal McCluskey reports: A former employee of Tufts Health Plan pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday to stealing thousands of patients’ personal information in a scheme to collect fraudulent Social Security benefits and tax refunds, authorities said….
White-hat hackers lifted 560,000 corporate passwords in 31 days. We’re all screwed.
Richard Byrne Reilly reports: The password you use to log into your company network likely sucks. That’s the maybe-not-so-astonishing revelation from a group white-hat hackers who probe for vulnerabilities in corporate networks for a living. Over the course of a year, the hackers at Trustwave attacked more than 626,000 accounts throughout corporate America and were able to successfully crack…
1.4 Million Taxpayers Exposed to ‘increased risk of fraud and identity theft’ by IRS
J.D. Tuccille writes: The geniuses at the Internal Revenue Service gave sensitive data on over a million taxpayers to a printing contractor wiout checking the bona fides of any of the contractor’s employees, says the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The news comes from a report dated last month but just released to the public. This…
Former Georgia deputy sentenced in identity theft plot
Phil W. Hudson reports: Sean Lydell Street, 39, a former Richmond County, Ga., Deputy Sheriff, was sentenced Aug. 12 to two years in prison for stealing personal identification information to be used as part of a fraudulent tax refund scheme. Street worked for the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office from 2007 through 2012 and during the…
Another breach in post-secondary education reminds us again that no one’s enforcing data security at the federal level
What St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, NY wrote to enrollees and applicants after a security incident: On June 28, 2014, a St. Francis employee reported the loss of an external hard drive. Compare that to what they told the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office in their cover letter: On June 28, 2014, St. Francis…
Military Companies Brace for Rules on Monitoring Hackers
Chris Strom reports: Companies that do business with the Defense Department are bracing for new U.S. rules requiring them to report computer breaches to the Pentagon and give the government access to their networks to analyze the attacks. Groups representing the contractors are raising concern about the Pentagon rooting around their data, and say smaller…