Featured Articles

FTC Bans Twitter From Misleading Us for 20 Years

June 25, 2010 10:28

The Federal Trade Commission entered into a settlement with the social networking site Twitter on Thursday, June 25th.  The settlement was the result two 2009 hacker breaches, which resulted in 35 user accounts (mostly celebrities and politicians) being compromised and passwords...

Law Firm Security Lags Behind and Target of Hackers...Yikes!

June 05, 2010 22:06

 On a topic near and dear to my heart, I read an article at Law360 on Friday that was a real eye opener.  Not because I am concerned about my backyard (we have a CTO that is very on top of these issues), but because of the number of law firms that apparently do not have their networks...

Purdue Notifies 7,000 Students of SSN Theft 16 Months After Discovering the Breach

Mark McCreary
August 18, 2011 10:43

Purdue University informed 7,093 former students on Monday that their Social Security numbers may have been stolen from servers at the University on April 5, 2010.  The notification comes 16 months after the discovery of the breach. According to the (Indiana) Journal & Courier, the...

Supreme Court Refuses to Make Landmark Privacy Ruling

June 18, 2010 10:44

The Supreme Court issued a ruling yesterday (8-1) in Ontario, Calif. v. Quon, U.S., No. 08-1332, 6/17/10 (PDF link), basically punting on elaborating on Fourth Amendment privacy rights because technology is still emerging.  The technology?  Pagers. The police department for the...

Latest Privacy Nightmare: Google Buzz in the Workplace

February 16, 2010 13:22

Google committed its biggest misstep in recent memory with the launch of its new social media tool, Google Buzz.  You would have to intentionally not be paying attention to have missed the furor over the privacy and trust violations alleged by angry users and advocates since its launch on...

Recent Articles

An Example of the Right Way to Handle a Data Breach: Motorola Xoom

Mark McCreary
February 15, 2012 00:24

You may have read that Motorola announced on February 3rd that it inadvertently sold around 100 refurbished Motorola Xoom tablets through Woot.com without putting the tablets through the typical process of doing a factory reset and wiping any personal data that may have been left by the original...

Data Breach Potentially Affects Up to 100,000 Students, 3,000 Employees

Mark McCreary
January 14, 2012 13:27

 The San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday that officials at the City College of San Francisco discovered a few days after Thanksgiving 2010 that certain computers of the college have been infested with active malware for more than a decade.  Up to 100,000 students and...

Personal Information Data Breaches - Not if, but When?

January 03, 2012 21:29

By Elizabeth Litten The widely publicized pre-Christmas breach of confidential data held by Stratfor Global Intelligence Service (“Stratfor”), a company specializing in data security, reminded me that very little (if any) electronic information is truly secure. If Stratfor’s...

2011 Data Breach Summary

Mark McCreary
December 28, 2011 23:30

Smart Money just ran a story about the top five data breaches of 2011.  While I do not necessarily agree that these are the top five (students, students, NYC hospital patients, not to mention the Stratfor breach), the takeaway is interesting: none of them have the same source for the...

FTC Settles With Facebook, Agrees to Whopping 20-Year Consent Order

Mark McCreary
November 30, 2011 11:52

According to a press release issued yesterday, November 29, 2011, by the Federal Trade Commission, Facebook settled charges that Facebook “deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made...