Items tagged with Data Theft
Is your Apple ID and other data safe? Chinese authorities recently arrested twenty-two people accused of selling the personal data of Apple customers. It is currently unclear how many customers have been affected. Police officers from the provinces of Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Fujian arrested the suspects this past weekend. Twenty of the the twenty-two suspects were “domestic employees of Apple” and worked for a “domestic direct sales company and outsourcing company”. The suspects reportedly used an “internal company computer system” to collect the data. We do not know the identities of the suspects or the vocations of the other two suspects at the this moment. Apple headquarters in Cupertino,...
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Most of the time, when we hear about data breaches, it's because companies have either been compromised or failed to properly protect data. This time around, however, it's the United Postal Service in the limelight. Data on as many as 800,000 employees may have been stolen along with data on customers who called the USPS' various call centers between January and August of this year. USPS spokesperson David Partenheimer told Reuters that "The intrusion is limited in scope and all operations of the Postal Service are functioning normally." What appears to set this attack apart from most other intrusions is that the attackers apparently weren't interested in either identity theft or credit card...
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Programmer/activist Aaron Swartz has been arrested for data theft in connection with an incident that occurred at MIT in late 2010. Swartz is accused of downloading nearly five million documents from JSTOR, an online, non-profit academic journal archive system. The particulars are as follows: Swartz, who has a history as a political advocate and founded the group Demand Progress, was granted access to JSTOR as part of a fellowship at Harvard University's Center for Ethics. He therefore had the undisputed right to access JSTOR content--though not, as the filing notes, the authority to download the database using automated tools, reproduce such articles, or download the entire contents of any journal...
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Considering the explosion of layoffs announced in recent weeks, companies would do well to seriously be on guard against data theft. According to a survey that polled some 800 companies in eight countries, 42 percent of firms admitted that laid-off employees were the single largest threat to their data security.The survey, which was unsurprisingly conducted by security / technology firm McAfee, found that businesses overall risk losing over one trillion dollars from "loss or theft of data and other cybercrime." After a so-called "rapid acceleration of malicious software" -- better known by laypersons at malware -- occurred in 2008, McAfee set out to really find what all was at stake. By the numbers,...
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