Data Leakage
Terrifying stories of mass data loss involving Personally Identifiable Data
Recent cases of lost data have damaged public perception of government competence
Over 80% of the population in Scotland has lost confidence in the UK government’s ability to look after personal data; this is the stark finding of the first comprehensive survey of its kind into the psychological impact of recent public sector information losses.
The [...]
The BBC published an interesting article on some research from Symantec.
Symantec calculated the figure to quantify the scale of fraud it found during a year-long look at the internet’s underground economy.
Credit card numbers were the most popular item on sale and made up 31% of all the goods on offer.
Coming in second were bank details [...]
The Washington Post reports that a single cyber crime group has stolen more than a half million bank, credit and debit card accounts over the past two-and-a-half years using one of the most advanced strains of computer spyware in existence, according to research to be published today. The discovery is among the largest stolen data [...]
Continue ReadingDavid Strom writes in the New York Times about how to stop your commercially sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands:
AS more small businesses rely on e-mail and instant messaging for their communications, they would do well to use a number of inexpensive methods to preserve privacy and ensure that messages are read only [...]
I am not sure if it increasing awareness about personally identifiable data loss or we are just becoming more careless with personal data but the data loss diary for October 2008 is a real stinker.
10 October – Theft of an MOD laptop containing personal identifiers, passport details, National Insurance numbers, family details and medical records [...]
The BBC reported today that an inquiry has been launched after a memory stick with user names and passwords for a key government computer system was found in a pub car park. Subcontractor Atos Origin, which lost the stick, said there had been a “direct breach” of its procedures. It said the matter was being taken “extremely [...]
Continue ReadingDespite many high profile cases of unencrypted backup tapes going missing, more than a third of organizations still do not know if they should encrypt their backup tapes and half do not know where they would store their tape backup encryption keys. This is one of the alarming findings in the new 2008 Encryption and Key Management [...]
Continue ReadingI picked up an extremely interesting article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph this morning. The article claims that some Chip & PIN Point of Sale devices manufactured in China have been tampered with at source and that PIN numbers and other secure data has been sent to offshore thieves.
Dr Joel Brenner, the US National Counterintelligence [...]
Deutsche Telekom is involved in the latest data leakage scandal. The mobile division T-Mobile has admitted that over 17 million customer data records were stolen in 2006. Der Spiegel reports that the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) records, phone numbers, addresses, birth dates and some e-mail addresses of customers, were being offered for sale on the Internet.
The stolen data [...]
I have been catching up on press releases that have come in since I have been on holiday and picked up one from Secerno.
Perimeter application firewall requirement leaves customer data vulnerable to growing insider threat, claims database security expert
Secerno’s products are designed to protect the database by implementing a set of perimeter controls and rules [...]
I picked up a press release about a medium sized firm of Financial Advisors changing over from paper based to scanned images for storing their client files.
Independent financial advisors, IFS, standardise on Kodak’s ScanMate i1120 scanners to manage client files
* Financial Services Authority requires client paperwork to be stored indefinitely
* Moving away from paper storage to scanning [...]
The Daily Mail reports that a UK Government investigation was launched after the personally identifiable information (PII) of more than a million bank customers was found on a computer sold on eBay.
Highly sensitive information on American Express, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland customers was found on the disk array sold for £35.88 (about $72).
The [...]
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