MS: Head Start records containing personal information stolen from Moss Point office

 Breach Incidents, Miscellaneous, Theft  No Responses »
May 162013
 

April Havens reports:

 Residents’ personal information could be in jeopardy after someone took Head Start records from Jackson County Civic Action Committee Inc.’s Jefferson Street facility in Moss Point.

Spokeswoman Hannah Donegan sent out a news release today saying the theft occurred between April and April 24, and a police report has been filed in Moss Point.

The stolen records include names, mailing addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates and some health records for students and families who applied for Head Start in the 2008-2009 school year, she said.

“We have no way of knowing how many files were stolen,” JCCAC Executive Director Diann Payne said. “But we have alerted all parents of the possibility that they might be affected.”

Read more on GulfLive.com.

A notice on the JCCAC’s web site reads:

Between April 22 and April 24, 2013, records from Jackson County Civic Action Committee, Inc.’s Head Start program were stolen from the Jefferson Street facility in Moss Point.

Records included names, mailing addresses, Social Security numbers, birthdates and some health records for students and families who attended Head Start in the 2008-2009 school year.

JCCAC has filed a police report with the Moss Point Police Department for the theft.

As a preventative step, JCCAC recommends anyone who applied for Head Start during the 2008-2009 school term closely monitor their and their child’s financial information and promptly report suspicious activity to their financial institution. JCCAC also recommends that parents submit a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission by calling 1-877-ID-THEFT (1-877-438-4338) or by visiting https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/

Individuals may also want to contact Equifax, Transunion and Experian to obtain a credit report; they can do so by calling 1-877-322-8228 or by visiting www.annualcreditreport.com.

Even if fraud isn’t detected immediately, it is recommended that individuals consistently monitor their credit. They may also wish to place a security freeze on credit. This is free for individuals with a police report indicating record theft, which affected individuals may pick up at JCCAC’s Central Office at 5343 Jefferson St., Moss Point MS, 39563. To obtain a freeze, contact the following agencies:

Individuals who may have been affected should contact JCCAC Executive Director Diann Payne at 228-769-3317 or Head Start Program Director Vanessa Gibson at 228-769-3401.

Nuix and EDRM republish Enron data set cleansed of more than 10,000 items containing private, health and financial information

 Breach Incidents, Miscellaneous, U.S.  No Responses »
May 162013
 

A follow-up to an issue recently raised by BeyondRecognition.net and discussed on this blog.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – May 15, 2013 — Nuix, a worldwide provider of information management technologies, and EDRM, the leading standards organization for the eDiscovery and information governance market, have today republished the EDRM Enron PST Data Set after cleansing it of private, health and personal financial information. Nuix and EDRM have also published the methodology Nuix’s staff used to identify and remove more than 10,000 high-risk items at nuix.com/enron.

The EDRM Enron data set is an industry-standard collection of email data that the legal profession has used for many years for electronic discovery training and testing. It was sourced from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s investigation into collapsed energy firm Enron. In early 2012, the EDRM Enron PST Data Set and the EDRM Enron Data Set v2 became an Amazon Web Services Public Data Set, making them a valuable public resource for researchers across a variety of disciplines

“Recently, we have been working closely with Nuix to cleanse the data set of private information about the company’s former employees and make the cleansed data set readily available to the community,” said George Socha and Tom Gelbmann, co-founders of EDRM. “These efforts help to protect the privacy of hundreds of individuals and we encourage anyone who finds private data that we did not remove to notify us.”

Using a series of investigative workflows on the EDRM Enron PST Data Set, Nuix consultants Matthew Westwood-Hill and Ady Cassidy identified more than 10,000 items including:

  • 60 items containing credit card numbers, including departmental contact lists that each contained hundreds of individual credit cards
  • 572 containing Social Security or other national identity numbers—thousands of individuals’ identity numbers in total
  • 292 containing individuals’ dates of birth
  • 532 containing information of a highly personal nature such as medical or legal matters.

Many items contained multiple instances and types of information. This included departmental contact list spreadsheets with dates of birth, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, home addresses and other private details of dozens of staff members.

The investigative team also clearly demonstrated that these items did not stay within the Enron firewall. For example, some staff emailed “convenience copies” of documents containing private data to their personal addresses.

“Nuix and our partners have conducted sweeps for private and credit card data for dozens of corporate customers and we are yet to encounter a data set that did not include some inappropriately stored personal, financial or health information,” said Eddie Sheehy, CEO of Nuix. “The increasing burden of privacy and data breach regulations, combined with the strict requirements of credit card companies, make this an unacceptable business risk.

“Using the methodology we are publishing alongside the cleansed EDRM Enron data, organizations can identify private and financial data, find out if it has been emailed outside the firewall and take immediate steps to remediate the risks involved.”

Nuix is currently applying the same methodology to the EDRM Enron Data Set v2, which it will also republish at nuix.com/enron.

Nuix will host a Twitter chat to discuss the release of the cleansed EDRM Enron PST Data Set on Thursday, May 23rd 2pm – 3pm ET. Nuix experts will describe the process of identifying unsecured financial, health and personally identifiable information in corporate data. Follow the hashtag #NuixChat and send in your questions beforehand to @nuix.

SOURCE:  EDRM and Nuix

TN: Mayor’s donation check among records found in dumpster

 Breach Incidents, Exposure, Miscellaneous, Paper, U.S.  No Responses »
Apr 292013
 

Andy Wise reports:

The director of an adult literacy charity is trying to figure out how the personal information of former associates and donors, including Memphis Mayor AC Wharton, were piled up inside the charity’s dumpster.

“It absolutely should not have happened,” said Kevin Dean, executive director of Literacy Mid-South, based in Cooper-Young. “It was a huge mistake, and we are terribly sorry to the mayor and anyone else who was affected.”

Wednesday, Cooper-Young business owner Bret James alerted The Action News 5 Investigators to the dumpster, adjacent to both his property and Literacy Mid-South on Cooper St.

James said what appeared to be computer keyboards in good condition caught his eye. When he went to inspect them, he found the records.

“People’s Social Security numbers, home addresses, bank account and checking account numbers,” James said.

The records, by our inspection, appear to be 6-year-old documents of the former Mid-South Reading Alliance and the University of Memphis’ Memphis Reads program.

Read more on WMCTV.

Two Miami Men Convicted In Identity Theft Tax Refund Fraud Scheme Involving Over 1,000 Victims

 Breach Incidents, Education Sector, ID Theft, Miscellaneous, U.S.  Comments Off
Apr 162013
 

Earnest Baldwin, 36 of Miami, and Earl Baldwin, 42 of Miami were convicted on April 10 for their participation in a tax refund scheme using stolen identities. They had been charged in October 2012.

According to testimony and evidence presented at trial, the defendants were involved in an identity theft tax fraud scheme that operated from July 2011 through June 2012. During the course of their fraud scheme, approximately $1.7 million in fraudulent refund claims were submitted to the IRS for payment. Nearly all of these claims requested payment of the refunds onto pre-paid debit cards and some of these claims were filed from Earl Baldwin’s residence.

The trial testimony and evidence further showed that Earnest Baldwin was found with over 1,000 individual names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers and approximately 40 pre-paid debit cards in other people’s names. Some of these papers seized included high school report cards with identity information and data from an organization for disabled persons containing identity information. Neither the school nor the organization were named in the press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Two additional co-conspirators, Lineten Belizaire, 22, and Marckell Steward, 21, both of Miami, previously pled guilty in this matter. Belizaire pled guilty to access device fraud and aggravated identity theft on March 18, 2013. Steward pled guilty to conspiracy to commit access device fraud and aggravated identity theft on January 31, 2013.

Source: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Florida.

Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic

 Breach Incidents, Exposure, Miscellaneous, Paper, U.S.  4 Responses »
Dec 102012
 

And yet again:

A resident contacted Target 11 saying he had discovered boxes of documents from a non-profit development agency in the West End of Pittsburgh. He said the documents, including names and Social Security numbers, were sitting right out in the open next to a dumpster on a public sidewalk.

“They contained people’s Social Security numbers, row after row of them,” West End resident and community activist Carl Suter told Target 11 Investigator Rick Earle.

Suter said he discovered the documents on a street corner in the West End in front of the former officers of the West Pittsburgh Partnership, a non-profit community development group in the West End.

Read more on WPXI.

And will this breach cost them anything? Possibly not. And as of WPXI’s story, the documents had not been returned to the organization by the individual who found them, as he doesn’t trust them.

More on the Wounded Warrior Project laptops theft

 Breach Incidents, Miscellaneous, Theft, U.S.  Comments Off
Nov 282012
 

Back in September, I noted that a burglary at Wounded Warrior Project’s Jacksonville headquarters may have compromised some employees’ information.  WWP’s notification to the Maryland Attorney General’s Office is now available online, and so we now have some additional details:

Information on the stolen laptops included employees’ names, addresses, passport numbers, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, credit card information, bank account numbers, and/or life insurance dependent information.  In other words, pretty much everything important.

WWP reports that the laptops were remotely locked by their IT department upon discovery of the theft on July 25, and that as of the time of their September letter to Maryland, they had no reports of misuse of data.  The theft had been discovered within a matter of hours.

This was WWP’s second breach within two months, as the project had reportedly been hacked back in June, with the hackers claiming to have accessed and acquired sensitive information as well as administrative login credentials.

 

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