Data Breach - Page 2

Equifax accidentally encouraged people to use the wrong website to check if their personal information was included in a massive security breach on numerous occasions.

The CEO of Equifax, Richard Smith, is set to testify before Congress following a massive data breach that left the personal data of 143 million people vulnerable.

Consumer credit reporting agency Equifax reportedly lobbied lawmakers and federal agencies for looser regulations just months before the company fell victim to a major cyberattack leaving the personal info of 143 million people vulnerable.

An online chatbot which was originally created to help users overturn parking tickets could be used by those affected by the Equifax data breach to help sue the company for up to $25,000.

Following their acquisition of Yahoo’s Internet services, Verizon is reportedly unable to rid itself of a number of lawsuits relating to a 2013 data breach.

Australian computer security expert Troy Hunt has revealed the leak of 711 million e-mail addresses, which was caused by a misconfigured spambot.

The parent company of the secretive dating website Ashley Madison is set to pay out $11 million to the victims of the site’s 2015 data breach.

An online tool that helped college students and their families complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) application for financial assistance has been taken offline until the fall.

The 2014 hack of Yahoo may have been the result of a phishing attack, according to a recent report.

Roughly 1,000 employees of a Texas border school district learned their Social Security numbers were compromised in a data security breach caused by a questionable email.

HOUSTON, Texas – The credit card information of customers of a Houston based chicken franchisee that operates several Popeye’s Chicken stores may have been hacked, the parent company revealed on Thursday.

The personal information of thousands may have been compromised by a security breach in San Antonio’s largest school district, only it happened in August and the affected students and staffers are first learning about it now.

Hackers penetrated the Friend Finder Network in October in one of the largest known personal data breach in history, with over 412 million accounts compromised.

Approximately 22,000 pages of sensitive data about India’s six new French-built Scorpene submarines have leaked onto the Internet, creating what retired Vice-Admiral A.K. Singh described as a “potentially fairly disastrous” situation.

Data from patient records from August 1, 2008 through April 30, 2014 were left behind at the former Planned Parenthood facility at 3365 Hillcrest Road and were found by the building’s new owner — pro-life crisis pregnancy center Clarity Clinic — on May 6. She added that Planned Parenthood sent letters to the affected patients on July 1.

On Monday, an anonymous hacker posted a data file containing personal data on 50 million Turkish citizens, including their addresses, birthdates, and the national identifier numbers issued by the Turkish government.

A secretly installed data monitoring system, meant to keep track of all the Internet traffic on University of California campuses, has become the focus of a contentious debate over whether free speech and privacy are at stake there.

If you’re registered to vote, you may be one of the more than 191 million U.S. citizens whose personal information was exposed through a misconfigured database that’s just been discovered.

An anonymous adviser to Bernie Sanders has alleged that the recent data breach of Clinton voter data was a false-flag attack staged by the DNC.

Another data point for the ongoing debate about whether China has scaled back its cyber-espionage activities a little, or not at all, since Presidents Xi Jinping and Barack Obama met in Washington a few months ago: the Australian government was just hit by a major cyber-attack, which it blames on China.

AshleyMadison is a website catering to married people who wish to have an affair. They claim to have 37 million users, and now all of their personal data is in the hands of a hacker group called The Impact Team, which is threatening to expose all those users unless AshleyMadison and a sister site called EstablishedMen are taken down.

According to the revised government estimate, some 21.5 million Social Security numbers were stolen by the hackers. The Office of Personnel Management has announced it will pay for credit-monitoring and identity-theft services for all of them. If a significant number of the pilfered identities are used for criminal activity, the financial chaos unleashed will be devastating.

As always, the breach was hushed up, and its full extent is still either unknown or being kept from the public, including potential primary and secondary identity theft victims. (When personnel files are raided, the friends and family of the targets have reason to be nervous that they might be the next targets.)

The government knew security was wide open for years, and did nothing. It’s a wonder they weren’t hacked before now. There will be no “accountability” for any of this. The Obama Administration doesn’t like to concede any sort of error by collecting scalps from inept high-level employees, and it worries a great deal about what some of them might say in whistleblower interviews or tell-all books.

House and Senate staffers were previously told by OPM that only those with executive branch experience were at risk from the hack. Not until today’s House Oversight Committee hearings did the OPM director officially acknowledge that workers from all three branches of government were affected by the data breach.

No one is ever held responsible for failure in government any more; even the most breathtaking incompetence and abuse lead to zero terminations or punishment. Congress is beginning to grumble about hearings and subpoenas, but even those tend to be ignored and subverted in the Obama era.

Like the federal employees who have complained of being left to twist in the wind for months until the breach was acknowledged – and then forced to sit through days of stonewalling while officials revised their stories about how severe the penetration was, and how many people were affected – Chaffetz does not seem impressed with the transparency or vigor of the Administration’s response.

The big question about the massive data breach of the U.S. federal government, perpetrated in April but just revealed to the American public yesterday, is whether the Chinese government was responsible.

This could be one of the most devastating blows yet struck in the shadowy First Cyber War. The Associated Press reports “the Obama administration is scrambling to assess the impact of a massive data breach involving the agency that handles security clearances and employee records.”

A number of Hollywood guilds have reached out to members to notify them that their personal information may have been stolen in the recent data breach attack on Anthem.