Four Waco area women have been arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit identity theft in a scheme involving stolen Fingerprint Applicant Services of Texas (FAST) applications required by licensing and certification entities such as the Texas Education Agency. A seven count federal grand jury indictment, returned on Tuesday and unsealed yesterday afternoon, charges 32-year-old Angela Cuellar,…
13 million deviantART e-mail addresses exposed by hackers
Matthew Humphries covers a Silverpop-related deviantART e-mail address hack mentioned previously on this blog: Pre-Christmas 2010 will be remembered as the time when well-known online brands and websites started to fall to hackers. The biggest of them all so far has been Gawker, and we’ve also seen McDonalds have its databases compromised this week. But…
Fallout from Recent Spear Phishing Attacks?
Brian Krebs writes: McDonald’s and Walgreens this week revealed that data breaches at partner marketing firms had exposed customer information. There has been a great deal of media coverage treating these and other similar cases as isolated incidents, but all signs indicate they are directly tied to a spate of “spear phishing” attacks against e-mail marketing…
Nine St. Joseph's/Candler employees snagged in medical information breach
Eric Curl reports: Nine St. Joseph’s/Candler employees were punished after a digital image of a patient’s anatomy was photographed, texted by cell phone and posted to Facebook. In all, three employees have been fired, three have been written up, and three have been suspended without pay. Eight of those disciplinary actions occurred Wednesday. Another hospital…
UK: Patients contacted after data loss at Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust
Kevin Core reports: Confidential patient records have been stolen from a local hospital. Now Huddersfield patients have been contacted by the hospital trust after the theft of a laptop sparked a security scare. Around 1,500 patients yesterday received a letter from Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust, which told them that their details were among those…
Ca: N.S. health privacy law concerns journalists
The Canadian Press reports: Nova Scotia legislation that aims to protect personal health records but also raises fears that it’s too restrictive on the media has passed. Fred Vallance-Jones, a journalism professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax, has said the law could see journalists face fines of up to $10,000 or six…