Lowe’s is notifying some current and former vehicle drivers as well as employees who access and administer a driver file system that their personal information was exposed on the Internet for nine months. In their notification letter dated today, Scott Purvis, Vice President of Human Resources for Lowe’s writes: Lowe’s contracts with a third-party vendor to provide a…
South Korea Increases Data Breach Fines, Lowers Liability Threshold
James Lim reports: Recent data breach amendments (Bill No. 10479) to South Korea’s framework data protection law increase available fines; lower the liability threshold that regulators must show to levy fines; allow compensation of individual plaintiffs without a showing of damages; and require notification of affected individuals within 24 hours of discovering a breach, a Korea…
U.S. Mines Personal Health Data to Find the Vulnerable in Emergencies
As soon as I saw the headline in the New York Times, I figured someone was going to raise privacy concerns. I wasn’t wrong. Sheri Fink reports: The phone calls were part Big Brother, part benevolent parent. When a rare ice storm threatened New Orleans in January, some residents heard from a city official who had gained…
Disgraceful misuse of medical records in Texas political campaign
This is just plain ugly politics. And any person involved in making these records public for political purposes is not fit for any public office.
Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine students notified of breach by benefits administrator Hubbard-Bert
Hubbard-Bert is the benfits administrator for students at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine. On April 24, they learned that spreadsheets containing personal information of some LECOM students was inadvertently exposed on the Internet due to a misconfiguration of a test server on April 14 (yes, a test server should not have live data for exactly this reason)….
Social Science Site Using Azure Loses Data
Charles Babcock reports: Dedoose, a social science data company, has lost some of its customers’ data while operating on the Microsoft Azure cloud. “This is a horrible moment for our company. We have never lost data or had a breach,” said Dedoose president Eli Lieber in an interview. At best, it will be able to…