Author: Maryann Bell

Wonga Data Breach: 250,000 UK and 25,000 Poland Clients Affected

British payday loan company Wonga, provider of short term loans with high interest rates, is said to have fallen into the hands of hackers. The Wonga data breach is affecting the payday loan company’s 250,000 clients in the UK and about 25,000 in Poland. In 2016, such companies as Yahoo, Tumblr, Linkedlin, Daily Motion, and Adult Friend Finder to name a few have experienced data breaches. Names, addresses, emails, telephone numbers including bank details and ethnicity data were compromised. Hackers are still on the rise this 2017 and Wonga is one of those that has been recently affected. Wonga says...

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ABTA Data Breach – 43,000 Users Impacted

ABTA, the website belonging to the largest travel and trade organization that is responsible for more than $39 billion in vacation sales through their relationships with travel agents and tour operators, has been involved in a data breach that may have impacted as many as 43,000 users. Of those 43,000 users, approximately 13,000 users had personally identifiable information, such as email addresses and phone numbers, stored on the website. In addition, user’s vacation photos and account passwords may have been compromised. ABTA has known about the data breach since February 27th, but only released this information today. ABTA is alerting...

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2014 Yahoo Data Breach Suspects Charged, Ties to Russia

In 2014, four men with suspected connections with the FSB – the Russian Federal Security Service and successor of the KGB, hacked into Yahoo compromising some 500 million e-mail accounts, including those of Russian and US government officials. Due to the nature of e-mails, e-mail accounts can be particularly vulnerable to hack attacks due to their often personal nature, and a wide variety of information can be gleaned from them. Yesterday, Wednesday March 15th, federal authorities indicted the four men in a Northern District of California Grand Jury court on charges ranging from identity theft, the theft of trade...

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New Regulations Force Data Breach Notifications

As a result of the increasing vulnerability of personal and confidential data in the Information Age, legislation is being proposed that would require companies to notify users of potential data breaches, their implications, and best practices next steps in securing their information in the immediate and in the future. This pressing need is most demonstrated by a couple of attempts, including one mentioned, to propose legislation that would require companies to be more proactive in alerting their clients of potential data breaches. House Bill 15 proposed by Bill Lehm of Bernalillo County, New Mexico, would require data breaches that...

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River City Media Data Breach: Spammergate

The known spam operator, River City Media, was recently the target of a data breach that resulted in the theft of hundreds of thousands of e-mail addresses and other details that severely hindered some of their operations. As a result, they appear to have switched a number of aliases and retooled their use of social media in an attempt to mitigate any future exposure to such an attack. This incident is being called “Spammergate.” The main takeaway from Spammergate is that, in a cloud-based environment where infrastructure is so distributed and the channels of communication so broad, the compromise of...

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