About 32,000 people are being notified that their personal information may have been compromised after a breach at consumer data provider LexisNexis resulted in identity theft and credit fraud, the company has disclosed. According to the breach notification letter LexisNexis began sending on Friday, the thieves operated businesses that were former customers of data aggregator and credentialing service ChoicePoint, which was acquired last year by LexisNexis parent Reed Elsevier.
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Officials at the University of California at Berkeley on Friday began notifying students and the public that hackers had breached a healthcare database at the school, potentially gaining access to the personal information of up to 160,000 students dating back to 1999. Complicating matters: The breach is thought to have initially occurred months ago, on Oct. 9, 2008. Administrators said they didn’t notice it until April 9, 2009, however.
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Hackers are demanding $10 million to release some eight million patient records claimed to be in their control following the compromise of Virginia’s Prescription Monitoring Program (VPMP) website. Whistleblower site Wikileaks published a copy of the ransom note left by the hackers on the website, which is used by pharmacists to follow incidents of drug abuse. The note said the intruders possessed 8.3 million patient records and 35.6 million prescriptions. Also, the thieves said they created an encrypted backup of the data and deleted the original files.
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September 11th, 2007
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Jan Paul Oson is an IT manager that has been working for a community health care organization in the United States. He got a bad performance evaluation so he resigned. Two months after
doing that, he decided that it would be a nice thing to hack into his ex-employer’s data base and start deleting some stuff. That’s when the Police decided it would be nice to arrest him. He’s facing up to 10 years behind bars now, but I can’t say that I feel sorry for him. He is a cyber-criminal of the lowest type.
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Security That Nets Malicious Web Sites Science Daily. Have you ever wondered how fraudulent or malicious websites can rank highly on search engines like Google or Yahoo? Professor Audun Josang suggests develop a new type of internet security system based on “reputation” where a community of users can rank the quality of a website. (Credit: Image courtesy of Queensland University of Technology)
Ads by Google. Queensland University of Technology IT researcher Professor Audun Josang said a website’s ranking was determined by the number of people who visited the site – the more hits the higher the ranking.
But this system is fraught with danger and can be easily manipulated directing people to unreliable, low quality and fraudulent sites, according to Professor Josang.
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