Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Recent electronic privacy violations

Man your screwed if you applied or attented BC, Berkly or Chico, are insured by Kaiser, use your GM charge card, have a case in LexisNexis, shop at DSW, and had a BofA account through the government!


Man you just can't catch a break - did every thing by the book, including using Iron Mountain storage but Time Warner Inc. on Monday said data on 600,000 current and former employees stored on computer back-up tapes was lost by an outside storage company, which the U.S. Secret Service is now investigating. Time Warner's data storage company, Boston-based Iron Mountain Inc. , lost the tapes during transport, Time Warner said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/02/AR2005050200764.html

4/19
Ameritrade's unnamed shipping company looses a tape with 200K user accounts.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/19/technology/ameritrade/index.htm?cnn=yes

4/13
GM MasterCard notifies 187,000 GM MasterCard customers may have had their personal information compromised.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/13/news/fortune500/gm_creditcard/index.htm?cnn=yes

4/12
Tufts warns 106,000 alums and doners of possible data disclosure.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/04/12/HNtufts_1.html

4/12
Update on LexisNexis (its worse than they first admitted) An investigation by the firm's Anglo-Dutch parent Reed Elsevier determined that its databases had been fraudulently breached 59 times using stolen passwords, leading to the possible theft of personal information such as addresses and Social Security numbers.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050412/tc_nm/media_lexisnexis_dc_2

3/28
UC Berkeley (not to be left out) has just disclosed the theft of a laptop with 98,000 alumni, graduate students and past applicants data containing SSNs, birth dates, and locations.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,67052,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3

California State University, Chico - hackers gained access to 59,000 names and Social Security numbers of current, former and prospective students, faculty and staff.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/03/22/university.hackers.ap/index.html

Boston College warns server hosting a fund-raising database containing 120,000 identities was rootkit-ed.
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/holes/story/0,10801,100439,00.html

Kaiser Permanente - notifying 140 patients that a disgruntled former employee posted confidential information about them on her Weblog. The woman, who calls herself the ``Diva of Disgruntled,'' claims it was Kaiser Permanente that included private patient information on systems diagrams posted on the Web, and that she pointed it out.
http://news.com.com/Kaiser+smarting+from+data+scrape/2061-1009_3-5611267.html?part=rss&tag=5611309&subj=news

LexisNexis - fraud artists had assumed the identities and used the passwords of legitimate customers to download the customer data.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19982-2005Mar9.html

DSW Shoe Warehouse - theft of credit card and purchase data of customers at 103 of its 175
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17831-2005Mar8.html

Bank of America -- Lost backup tapes which contained personal information, including Social Security numbers, addresses, and account numbers for employees in several government agencies.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/02/26/financial_data_lost_by_bank_of_america/

ChoicePoint - perpetrators were able to dupe the company, which provides consumer data services to insurance companies, other businesses and government agencies, by passing themselves off as legitimate customers.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5582144.html