Barnet Council has been fined £70,000 for losing documents containing the sensitive and confidential details of vulnerable children. According to the ICO  the  records were stolen during a burglary after a social worker employed by the  Borough of Barnet took the papers home from work. The documents  listed the names, addresses and dates of birth of  vulnerable children and included references to their sexual activities. The material was stored with an encrypted computer in a laptop bag which was taken [...]

Actiance has announced the release of Vantage for Microsoft SharePoint 2010, a new addition to the Actiance security and compliance platform. The solution allows enterprises to create granular policy controls for content inspection, real time alerts and role-based workflow for supervisory review, logging and archiving. For organizations in regulated industries, including financial services, legal and healthcare, this is a critical step to reduce risk and ensure corporate compliance with regulatory, legal and corporate governance rules. Collaboration tools, such as SharePoint, [...]

The Aneurin Bevan Health Board (ABHB) has been served a monetary penalty of £70,000  by the ICO. The fine was issued after a sensitive report was sent to the wrong person. According to the ICO, the error occurred when a letter containing a detailed psychological report of a mental-health patient had been sent to another former patient with a similar name. A consultant emailed his letter to a secretary for formatting, but did not include sufficiently clear identifiers for the [...]

According to the BBC, the home and email addresses of the 38,000 entrants to the London Marathon were accidentally published on the organisers’ website. The details were accessible all day to anybody logging on to the site and were available on the section in which commemorative medals, with individual race times inscribed, could be ordered. Nick Bitel, the chief executive of the London Marathon, said: “We apologise for this error, and are grateful to the BBC for bringing it to [...]

Leicestershire County Council have breached the Data Protection Act (DPA), following the theft of a briefcase containing sensitive personal data from a social worker’s home, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said today. The ICO was informed by the Council in May 2011 that a briefcase, containing documents to be used for initiating court proceedings, had been stolen from a social worker’s house during a burglary. These contained the sensitive personal data of 18 individuals which outlined details of neglect and [...]

Toshiba Information Systems (UK) have breached the Data Protection Act (DPA) after the personal details of 20 competition entrants were compromised by a security flaw on their website, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said today. The ICO was informed by a member of the public in September last year that the personal details of individuals registered for an online competition on the company’s website, were accessible. These included names, addresses and dates of birth, along with contact information. The ICO’s [...]

South London Healthcare NHS Trust has reported the use of two unencrypted memory sticks. The one device contained data relating to approximately 600 maternity patients, while the second contained the names and dates of birth of 30 children and full audiology reports for a further three children. In the first instance, an employee downloaded the data to a personal memory stick to do some work at home. Due to not having received up-to-date information governance training, the employee was unaware [...]

SafeNet has acquired Cryptocard. Cryptocard is an industry innovator in authentication-as-a-service, bringing organizations the cost reduction, simplicity, and flexibility that can only come from SaaS. New business efficiencies, infrastructure scale, and cost savings are being driven by virtualization and cloud services adoption, but this changing paradigm has challenged organizations to make the move to the cloud securely and smoothly, without disruption to their business, and without compromise to the protection of their sensitive data. SafeNet’s focus on data-centric data protection [...]

Leeds City Council has secured both corporate and employee-owned mobile devices used by their staff. The authority supplies council owned mobile devices to over 6ooo staff  and became aware of the need to manage a broad estate of devices and applications securely. The council recognised that many employees use their own devices, at least some of the time, for work and tested a range of MDM solutions, with the ability to manage and secure multiple devices being a key requirement. [...]

VISA and Mastercard are alerting banks across the US about a major breach at a U.S. based credit card processor, which might potentially affect more than 10 million compromised card numbers. The breached credit card processor was compromised between January 21 2012 and February 25 2012. VISA and MasterCard have warned that full Track 1 and Track 2 data was taken. This information could be used to counterfeit new credit cards. It is not yet known which U.S processor is [...]