Pzifer investigated for internal data breach
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Blog: 17,000 of the pharmaceutical company's employees may have had their personal data exposed on a Web site.
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Hewlett-Packard Co. HPQ.N said on   Sunday that it used improper methods to access phone records of   two employees, including its own spokesman, in an internal   probe into leaks to the media.
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A Louisana state agency acknolweedged that data stored on backup media lost from an Iron Mountain truck contained unencrypted personal data of state residents.
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A computer forensics expert has found more data that was contained on a state government backup tape stolen in Ohio in June.
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Two Canadian privacy agencies are expected to release today the results of a joint investigation into the security breach at TJX Cos. in which hackers stole more than 45.7 million credit and debit card numbers.
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The Internet's key oversight agency is investigating suspicions that insider information is being used to snatch desired domain names before an individual or business can register them.
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GNUCitizen is describing an apparent vulnerability that could trick people into revealing personal data.
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Things just aren&#39;t going well for Timothy Scott Short. Just days after a pair of tech support calls he made to printer manufacturer Digimarc&#160;resulted in his arrest, he now finds himself on the receiving end of a data breach with his Social Security number and birthdate accidentally made public via the federal court&#39;s Electronic Case Files (ECF) system.It&#39;s an ironic development, because Short, 33, was arrested in connection with the Oct. 5 theft of a Missouri Department of Revenue printer and a PC containing data on as many as 500 state residents.Short&#39;s personal information was discovered by the IDG News Service, listed on a court document called a Criminal Case Cover Sheet, which was publicly available to users of the ECF system. Normally, this document should only be accessible to those involved in the case, but it appears to have been inadvertently made public, according to a clerk with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak with the press. &quot;It&#39;s something on our side,&quot; she said, adding that technical staff is now looking into the problem.The U.S. Judicial Conference, which sets policy for U.S. courts, has said that this kind of information should be removed from publicly available electronic court records, but actually removing all the sensitive information has proved difficult.&quot;If you went online to various court systems, you could find social security numbers of many individuals,&quot; said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. &quot;It&#39;s a really, really difficult question to answer, just because you&#39;re dealing with so many jurisdictions.&quot;Social Security numbers are the building blocks of identity theft crime because they can be used to secure credit cards. &quot;Any time you are placing Social Security numbers online, your are subjecting that person to identity theft,&quot; Stephens said.With the push to make public documents available online, other government databases have had similar problems. Earlier this year, the states of California and Colorado were forced to take their Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) databases offline after privacy advocates pointed out that the Social Security numbers and other data they contained could be misused by identity thieves.Short, however, may have bigger problems to worry about. He&#39;s facing $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison on charges of possession of &quot;document-making implements&quot; in connection with the theft. He was arrested after U.S. Secret Service Special Agent John Bush recognized his voice in calls placed to a tech support line of the company that makes the stolen printer.&#160;
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WASHINGTON - The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has seized computers, software and equipment as part of a probe into the illegal sharing of copyrighted movies, music and games over an Internet &#39;peer-to-peer&#39; (P2P) network, Attorney-General John
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The SEC is looking into whether the financial-information provider failed to correct inaccurate data it published regarding a single mutual fund in a timely manner.
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Hewlett-Packard Co.  said on  Sunday that it used improper methods to access phone records of  two employees, including its own spokesman, in an internal  probe into leaks to the media.
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COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 17 -- Ohio  has hired a computer security expert to determine the likelihood of someone getting access to the data on a stolen backup storage device, Gov. Ted Strickland said Sunday.
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A security breach at Kingston Technology in September 2005 that was only recently discovered may have exposed the financial data of as many as 27,000 of the company's online customers.
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(InfoWorld) - A letter from Pfizer Inc.'s attorney to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal shows the drug maker first learned of a data breach involving about 17,000 of its employees on April 18 -- six weeks before the company started notifying them of the incident on June 1. The July 11 letter, signed by Bernard Nash of Dickstein Shapiro LLP, also said that that a "small group" of additional individuals may have been affected by the breach, in addition to the 17,000 that were originally reported. Nash's letter, which was posted online by New London, Conn.-based The Day, was in response to a note Blumenthal has sent on June 6 to Pfizer. In it Blumenthal sought a full explanation of the circumstances surrounding the breach, in which personal data belonging to about 17,000 Pfizer workers was exposed by a file-sharing program that had been illegally installed on a company laptop. According to Pfizer's original notice, about 15,700 individuals actually had their data accessed and copied by an unknown number of persons on a peer-to-peer network. The company said that while data on the rest of the affected individuals may have been exposed, it could not confirm if the information had actually been copied. Among the issues that Blumenthal sought clarifications on were the measures that Pfizer had in place prior to the breach to protect against data compromises, as well as information about when the company discovered the breach and how it responded to the incident. Blumenthal's letter also asked Pfizer to describe how it was able to make a distinction between the data that was actually copied and data that might only potentially have been accessed. In his formal response on Pfizer's behalf, Nash said that Pfizer learned of the incident on April 18 when an independent computer consultant informed the company that he had found Pfizer data on a peer-to-peer network. The compromise occurred on March 26 when the spouse of a Pfizer employee used the employee's password to access the computer and install an unauthorized file-sharing software program on it, Nash said. He however offered no explanation on why the company waited till June 1 to inform those affected by the breach. "That software was configured by the spouse so that other users of the file-sharing network could access certain files that the spouse had stored in the employees' laptop," Nash said. "Unfortunately, the software configuration also allowed users of the file-sharing network to access certain other files -- Pfizer files -- contained on the laptop," Nash noted in his letter. In addition to the personal data on Pfizer employees, other information pertaining to the company's pharmaceutical sales business and operations was compromised, he said. Some of the users on the file-sharing network who accessed Pfizer files were using newer file-sharing software versions that recorded the fact that certain files had been copied, Nash said. As a result, Pfizer was able to determine which of the files had been actually accessed and copied and which ones may have only been exposed, he added. Nash, however, offered no explanation on why the company waited till June 1 to inform those affected by the breach.
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WASHINGTON - Federal agents seized computers and software Wednesday as part of an investigation targeting an Internet network used to illegally share copyrighted music, movies, software and games, Attorney General John Ashcroft said.    The case marks the first federal criminal copyright action taken against a peer-to-peer, or P2P, network in which users can access files directly from the hard drives of fellow users' computers...
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The Veterans Affairs worker faulted for losing veterans&#039; personal information had permission to access millions of Social Security numbers on a laptop from home, agency documents obtained by The Associated Press show.
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Ziff Davis - Holes in KOffice and RealPlayer allow attackers to take over a user's system.