Mike Tsikoudakis reports: The average insurance cost per data breach incident increased sharply from $2.4 million in 2010 to $3.7 million in 2011, according to a new NetDiligence study released Tuesday. Based on insurance claims that were submitted in 2011 for incidents that occurred from 2009 to 2011, the average number of records exposed decreased…
Missing backup tapes reported to TD Bank customers
A letter from TD Bank to affected customers reads, in part: Some of your personal information was included on two data backup tapes that we shipped to another one of our locations in late March 2012. The tapes have been missing since then, and we have been unable to locate them despite diligent efforts. This…
Medical privacy threatened by loophole in draft EU data protection law, professor warns
Loek Essers reports: A “huge loophole” is being carved in the European Union’s upcoming data protection regulation, according Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge in England. The way the current draft of the law allows secondary uses of medical records is a privacy scandal waiting to happen, Anderson said…
JP: Internet used to guard medical records from disaster
Storing sensitive records in the cloud may have its own risks, but is that really worse than losing all your patients’ records? Yasuhiro Kobayashi reports what happened in Japan last year following the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami: According to Miyagi Prefecture’s medical association, 163 facilities, or 90 percent of hospitals and clinics in the…
Anatomy Of A Brokerage IT Meltdown
Regulators last year issued the SEC’s first-ever privacy fine against broker-dealer GunnAllen for failing to protect customer data. But former IT staffers say regulators didn’t seem to know half of this cautionary tale of outsourcing and oversight gone wrong. Mathew J. Schwartz adds some mind-boggling details to the case: Dan Saccavino, a former Revere Group…
Android app releases 760,000 users’s personal data, contacts online
Adam Westlake reports: A Japanese smartphone app for Android-powered devices has reportedly leaked the personal data of some 760,000 users on the internet. The address book application, Zenkoku Denwacho (“Nationwide Address Book”), was reported to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department on Saturday by NetAgent Co., an information security company, for the breach of user privacy. The application’s developer…