Archive for the ‘Data Breach News’ Category

Heartland Breach Settlement with Mastercard

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Courtesy of Digital Transactions, Heartland Payment Systems entered into a $41MM settlement agreement regarding their highly publicized data breach incident with Mastercard, Inc. Continuing its massive clean-up in the wake of the payment card industry’s biggest data breach, merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. late on Wednesday announced a ...

HITECH Breach Risk Assessment Webinar

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Healthcare organizations that fall under the definition of HIPAA covered entities should be very aware of their obligations under the data breach provisions of the HITECH Act. The reason being that there are now very substantial penalties for disregarding the security and privacy regulations, for lax ...

“It’s a lot less bad than it looks”

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Blippy, the social media site that is a "fun and easy way to see and discuss what everyone is buying", is a Silicon Valley startup funded by a who's who of venture capital funds. It also recently had a privacy data breach where Blippy members credit card information was accidentally ...

Equifax has their own data breach

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

by Doug Pollack In an interesting twist of fate, Equifax, one of the three major national credit bureau, acknowledged this week that they experienced a data breach last month when they: "sent out IRS W-2 statements to most if their current employees and some former employees, they discovered that some of the ...

Customer Churn Main Data Breach Cost Driver

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

by Doug Pollack The Ponemon Institute released their 5th annual 2009 Annual Study: Cost of Data Breach last month.  This year, the report explored several new areas and came up with some interesting and in some cases surprising conclusions. These include: - A large proportion (82%) of organizations surveyed experienced at least ...

North Pole Data Breach

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Just in,  data breach incident occurs at the North Pole. Santa has notified over 4MM good boys and girls and is providing one year of free credit monitoring and sleigh rides. While Linda Foley, chair of the Identity Theft Resource Center, was not familiar with this specific incident, she was ...

Data breaches lead to 4X higher incidence of identity fraud

Friday, October 30th, 2009

by Doug Pollack In a recently released report, Javelin Research has highlighted a key finding that is important to those of us who have received a data breach notification letter from an organization that we have entrusted with our personal information -- whether a bank, healthcare provider, insurer or merchant. This ...

Confirmation of Blue Cross Blue Shield Breach

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

by Doug Pollack The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) has affirmed that is has experienced a data breach incident affecting over 800,000 doctors in the US. According to Jeff Smokler at BCBSA, as reported in SC Magazine, thieves stole an employee's computer that contained an unencrypted file with the personal ...

Healthcare: Get Ready for HITECH Data Breach Notification Requirements

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

by Doug Pollack Starting September 23, 2009, healthcare organizations covered by HIPAA and the HITECH Act will be required, in the case of data breach incidents where personal health information (PHI) is improperly exposed, to notify both the individuals affected by the breach as well as the federal government, who will ...

Social Media Risks

Friday, April 24th, 2009

by Doug Pollack A recent news segment on the risks of identity crime that occur in the common usage of social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.