Tracy Kitten reports: A cyber-attack that hit Harbor Freight Tools and likely exposed card data processed at all 400 of its retail tool stores could rank among one of the biggest retail breaches this year, one card issuer says. In fact, the issuer, who asked to remain anonymous, says compromised cards linked to the Harbor Freight attack…
ICO provides breakdown of data breach reports
The Information Commissioner’s Office has provided an interesting breakdown of breach reports for the first quarter of their fiscal year. The data are provided by incident type and sector, here. Not surprisingly, the largest incident type was “disclosed in error.” The healthcare sector and local government reported the most breaches, but then, not every entity…
Tiger Team reviews accounting of patient data disclosures
Patrick Ouellette reports: Yesterday’s HIT Policy Committee Privacy & Security Tiger Team meeting discussed the background of accounting of disclosures for patient data and brought forward prevalent topics for its Sept. 6 virtual hearing. The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) had been investigating the accounting of disclosures issue and requested that the Tiger Team hold…
Paper records account for most Veterans Affairs data breaches
Frank Konkel reports: The leading cause of data breaches at the Department of Veterans Affairs continues to be paper-based records, according to VA Acting Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology Stephen Warren. Warren briefed reporters Aug. 8 on the data breach reports his agency submitted to Congress for April, May and June, and stated that…
Serious Farce Office: SFO suffers biggest-ever criminal data breach
James Moore reports: The Serious Fraud Office is engulfed by a new scandal after it admitted that thousands of pages of evidence as well as tapes and data files from 58 separate sources were sent back to the wrong owner. The enormous volume of evidence related to its long-running corruption investigation into defence giant BAE…
Dutch DNS server ‘hack’: Thousands of sites serve up malware
Martin Gijzemijter reports: Thousands of Dutch websites served up malware this week after what was initially thought to be a DNS server hack at SIDN, the Dutch administrator of the .nl domain extension. On Monday, the website of large Dutch online electronics retailer Conrad.nl was reportedly found to be serving malware, and was taken down…