Ten patients’ personal information has been lost after a sales vehicle containing a set of documents was stolen from a car park. Details of the physicians looking after the patients are also missing, along with the name, date of birth, age, gender, blood test data and questionnaire sheets detailing reactions to medications of the...
James McCarthy reports: A fraud expert was shocked to receive a confidential letter from a major bank – complete with the private account details of 14 other customers. Anne Gwilliam said that when she phoned Lloyds TSB to alert them, the operator told her the gaffe was a “major security breach” and promised someone...
The Federal Trade Commission has charged a mortgage broker with discarding consumers’ tax returns, credit reports, and other sensitive personal and financial information in an unsecured dumpster, in violation of federal law. According to the FTC, in December 2006, approximately 40 boxes containing consumer records were found in a publicly-accessible dumpster. The records included...
Didi Tang reports: Sensitive personal information — including Social Security numbers — for 565 foreign students at MSU was leaked this month when a university office sent an e-mail message with the data inadvertently attached. The school is investigating the incident and will contact all international students, offering answers and options to guard against...
Brain Krebs reports: A popular Web site that helps connect young women with so-called “Sugar Daddies” has fixed a major security hole that – apparently since its inception two years ago — allowed anyone with a Web browser to view the private negotiations between site members. Seekingarrangement.com, an adult social networking site that...
Mark Bonokoski reports: When the brown manila envelope arrived in the mail the other day at his home in rural Simcoe — the Toronto sender’s name discreetly reading P. Canada — Dave Eberly assumed his pardon had finally come through. And when that manila envelope arrived in the mail, Eberly thought it would...
Derby City Council has come under fire for breaching privacy laws by sending out a note containing the e-mail addresses of 50 council tax-payers. The error came to light when Julian Boardman, a web manager, received a electronic notice on Thursday morning informing him that his council tax payment was due. Later that day,...
Jessica Willey reports: It is information no one would want scattered on papers in a parking lot, much less thrown away in a dumpster for anyone to find. Medical records were found behind a 99 Cents store in southwest Houston putting people’s identities at risk. “This has got Social Security numbers, Medicare numbers. That’s...
Sometime between December 31 and January 2, a laptop was stolen from a locked Continental Airlines’ office in Newark. The laptop contained personal information on employees, vendors, and new hire candidates. The laptop, which was used for background security checks, contained confidential files on 230 individuals, including their names, Social Security numbers, fingerprint images,...
The World Bank’s Data Breach, And Its Sorry Follow-Up