AFP reports: France’s highest appeals court has ruled that authorities may not use a list of 3,000 people suspected of tax evasion as a basis to conduct searches due to its illicit origin. French authorities in January 2009 acted on a Swiss warrant and seized data about global banking giant HSBC’s customers from former computer…
UK: Gosport podiatrist's confidential records laptop stolen
BBC reports: A laptop containing personal and medical information of up to 1,500 people has been stolen from a podiatry clinic in Hampshire. The Zoostorm laptop, containing unencrypted data, was taken from the Walking On Air clinic in Gosport on Tuesday. Podiatrist Natasha Townsend said the laptop did have a password. The Information Commissioner’s Office…
Report: Data breaches from unencrypted devices up 525% in 2011
Dan Bowman reports on a new report by Redspin that analyzed breaches reported to HHS: According to the report, nearly 40 percent of all major PHI breaches occurred on a laptop or other portable media device, a problem the authors say isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. […] In the last year alone, data…
Follow-up: Birmingham woman sentenced to 39 months in prison in Trinity Medical Center records theft
There’s a follow-up to a case previously noted on this blog where a woman hopped over a counter at Trinity Medical Center (formerly known as Montclair Baptist Medical Center) and stole logs with patient information. Kent Faulk reports: A Birmingham woman, who had pleaded guilty in the theft, from Trinity Medical Center, of records that contained…
AU: Privacy Commissioner probes Fairfax hack (updated)
Darren Pauli reports: The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has opened an investigation into the breach of two Fairfax microsites to probe whether sufficient security mechanisms were in place during the attacks. […] Fairfax confirmed that two of its microsites were hacked but said up to 10,000 unencrypted credit card details compromised in the same attack…
IU Health Goshen Hospital notifies applicants and patients that data may have been accessed
AP reports that Indiana University Health Goshen is notifying more than 12,800 job applicants and patients that their personal information may have been obtained illegally through a computer virus. Hospital spokeswoman Melanie McDonald says the virus was discovered Dec. 22. An internet security company hired by the hospital was not able to determine whether any information was accessed,…