Archive for the ‘Data Breaches’ Category

Protect yourself during a data breach

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

A Maryland Department of Human Resources employee was placed on administrative leave after posting the Social Security numbers and other personal information of nearly 3,000 clients of a state agency on a third-party Web site. There is no evidence to date that the information was used for identity theft, but the ...

Identity theft is just one of the charges Palin’s email hacker will face

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

David Kernell is currently on trial on charges of identity theft, mail fraud and two other felony counts for the hacking of Sarah Palin's email while she was campaigning as the Vice Presidential candidate in September of 2008. While the attorney for 22 year old David Kernall is calling the ...

3.3 Million Student Loan Records Stolen

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

It's bad enough owing thousands of dollars in student loans in today's sparse economic climate. What's even worse is finding out you're one of 3,300,000 students that has just had their identity information stolen from Educational Credit Management Corp -- a student loan service company. The company, which stores personal information ...

Hard Drives Containing Information on 500,000 Patients Stolen from BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Bad news if you're a BlueCross BlueShield member in the Volunteer state. Fifty-seven hard drives that contained personal information on around 500,000 BCBS members has been stolen according to the insurance company. The theft happened on October 2nd when an unidentified thief stole the drives from a closet in ...

Study shows ID Theft risk climbs by five times after data breach

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Data breaches have become a common occurrence. We post about them nearly weekly here at LifeLockPromotionCode.net. Now a recent study by Javelin Research, a financial services research firm, shows an alarming coorelation between those involved in massive data losses and ID theft victims. To start, nearly 1 in 9 people ...

Over 800,000 doctors nationwide could be at risk of identity theft

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Unless the name following your Doctor title is House, Who, Doom, Pepper or Zhivago, there might be a chance your confidential records were one of 800,000 records contained on a laptop that was recently stolen. The laptop, which was owned by a Blue Cross and Blue Shield employee in Chicago, ...

Feds bust up identity theft ring in the U.S. and Egypt

Friday, October 9th, 2009

One hundred Egyptians and Americans were indicted Wednesday in what federal agents are calling one of the largest cybercrime cases ever. Fifty-three of those charged are living in the United States while the remaining hail from Egypt. In a speech on Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that fifty ...

Bad News for Hotmail Account Holders – 10,000 Accounts Breached

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

The world's most popular email service had a massive security breach last week. Over 10,000 accounts from the Hotmail, MSN and Live email systems -- all run by Microsoft -- were posted publicly online, including passwords. If you use an email ending in @hotmail.com, @msn.com or @live.com please go and ...

Newest scam: Have you received a call saying you owed past debt?

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

The latest scam to take the nation by storm has phony debt collectors contacting consumers and trying to collect past debt. The problem is that the consumer has already paid off the debt many years ago. This new breed of scammers has detailed access to people, including past debts ...

Secret Service Mole Charged in Largest ID Theft Scheme Ever

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

One hundred and thirty million. The number itself just boggles the mind. Try to think of 130,000,000 of anything and you'll get a headache. Now think of that number in regards to debit card information. That's right, 130 million account records -- that's the number that Albert Gonzalez stole... this ...

Will the Next Big Security Breach be from a Phone?

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Many times when companies have a "security breach" -- meaning a bunch of their client's confidential information lost or stolen -- it's due to a company laptop disappearing during a conference or being stolen from an office place. Previous examples of this happening would be the California Department of Health ...

Online ID Theft Prevention Begins with Building Strong Passwords

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Part of protecting yourself from identity theft online is creating strong passwords for your multiple online accounts. Many times passwords are simple words, dates or sequential numbers that are used because they're easy to remember. They're also easy to crack. A good password utilizes numbers, regular characters, upper case characters and ...

When Recycling Goes Too Far

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Businesses around the world are getting swept up into the new Green way of doing things. And for good reason. In addition to creating good public relations buzz and cutting costs it helps keep waste more manageable. But you can go too far. Recently a gas station in Mississippi began a ...

Binghamton University Data Breach

Friday, March 13th, 2009

Most data breach stories are rather boring and includes talk about how companies fail to protect their data. Most companies and organizations have a least one data breach at one time or another. Binghamton University has had many and can’t seem to get their act together. One would assume they ...

Ohio State University Data Breach

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Ohio State University found itself mailing out 18,000 letters over the holidays informing some of their students that their names and social security numbers could have fallen into the wrong hands. Not exactly what I want to hear after the holidays.