News: California reports massive data breach
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An intruder who cracked a U.C. Berkeley research system in August had access to private data on 1.4 million caregivers and beneficiaries participating in a state social program.
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More than 94 million accounts were affected in the theft of personal data from TJX Cos. , a banking group alleged in court filings, more than twice as many accounts as the Framingham retailer has said were affected in what was already the largest data breach in history.
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A security breach at AT&T has exposed personal information on over 19,000 people who shopped at the company's online store, the company confirmed Tuesday. The leaked data included credit card numbers.
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(InfoWorld) - The personal details of thousands of mostly U.S.-based PC users have been discovered stashed on a server located in France, another indication of use of the Internet to collect personal data on a vast scale. The Web page, which was live as of Monday morning, does not contain financial details of the users. But other Web pages associated with the same domain indicate the site could be connected to a group of hackers based in the Middle East known for their involvement in other Internet financial crime as well as defacing Web sites, said Chris Boyd, research manager for FaceTime Communications Inc., a security company. He posted more details on a company blog . The ISP (Internet service provider) that hosts the page has been contacted, Boyd said. The data appears to have been collected in April 2006, according to timestamps in the file, and includes the full names of people, their address and their IP address. Also included are the names of the Web sites from which the details were apparently collected. The names of those Web sites, most of which are now not active, appear to offer a freebie, with names such as www.likefreestuff.com and www.freebgift.com. The offer of a free gift is often made in exchange for data, Boyd said. There's nothing illegal about collecting data that users voluntarily submit. Likewise, the storing of personal details for marketing purposes is also not illegal. But leaving those details open on a server could violate European or U.S. data protection laws. It's not clear how that data on the French server is being used, but various hackers forums are aware it has been exposed, Boyd said. The e-mail addresses could immediately be used to send spam, while the addresses of the users could potentially be used for identity fraud. Research into the domain name hosting the data has also turned up clues that it may be connected to well-known hacking groups, he said. The server the domain is hosted on also hosts nearly 24,000 other domain names, another indication of possibly either phishing or other scam activity, Boyd said. One page on the same server contains a hacking tool that can be used for a variety of other nefarious activity, such as building custom Web pages with exploit code. The tool, called King IE Exploiter, is an application that can be used to find malicious software that can be incorporated into malicious Web pages, Boyd said. The application has been linked with Trojan horse programs aimed at stealing bank details and other malware that sends spam, he said. Interestingly, when King IE Exploiter starts running, it lists several usernames of hackers, Boyd said. "They're got quite a history for being known for all sort of elaborate scams and attacks," he said. Those attacks include a worm found two years ago that installed a fake BitTorrent client on targeted computers that distributed large video files. The users whose data is now circulating on the Internet in this incident may be less protected that other victims of large data breaches. In the U.S., some states have laws where businesses must contact those affected by a loss of data. However, user may be unaware how their data is now circulating or is used if it was collected by scammers, Boyd said. "It is quite worrying," Boyd said. "Obviously, they are quite happily gathering up all of this information."
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California university officials have warned nearly 600,000 students and faculty that they might be exposed to identity theft following incidents where computer hard drives loaded with their private information were lost or hacked into.    Since January, at least 580,000 people who had personal information about them stored in university computers received warnings they might be at risk...
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Heidi Montag wants to set the record straight about a surprising posting that went up on her Web site Mondayâshe didnât post it.  âMy Web site was hacked last night, so Iâm not sure what was posted up,â she said Tuesday during an event at a Lo...
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US federal and state officials are investigating the hacking of a University of California, Berkeley, computer containing Social Security numbers and other personal data for more than 1 million state residents.
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For the third time since June, Pfizer has disclosed a data breach involving sensitive information about individuals. As many as 34,000 people were affected this time.
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Malware, carelessness, data leaks--whether internal or external threats, there's too many to count.
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Sex, lies and audio-files The leak of an audio file containing embarrassing comments by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to news media has triggered a police probe.â¦
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Authorities are trying to determine how a hacker gained access to a University of California computer that contained personal information for up to 600,000 state residents.
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ID theft milestone reached The total number of US customer records compromised as a result of security blunders has hit the 100m milestone.â¦
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Bad timing for J.C. Penney CEO Personal information belonging to more than 650,000 US customers of J.C. Penney and other retailers is at risk after the company hired to safeguard the data lost a backup tape.â¦
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A year after the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs disclosed a huge data breach involving the theft of personal information on 26.5 million vets and active-duty military personnel, federal agencies have moved to prevent such a breach from happening again. Here are five steps taken along the way.
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A spouse and a peer-to-peer file-sharing program appear to be at the center of a data breach that exposed information on 17,000 Pfizer employees -- and maybe other individuals as well. Investigators would like to know why it took the company six weeks to reveal the problem.
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State and federal authorities are investigating a hacker attack at University of California, Berkeley, after someone broke into a computer containing the Social Security numbers
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The worst data breach made public so far -- the one that affected customers of TJX Companies -- is even worse than first thought. Court documents indicate that the number of accounts affected is 94 million, more than double initial estimates.