Private data has been lost by or stolen from UK local councils more than 1,000 times since 2008, a report says. The data included details relating to children and vulnerable people in care, campaign group Big Brother Watch said. Some 132 authorities said they had had a total of 1,035 cases of data loss or theft between 2008 and 2011. The Information Commissioner said it was vital councils kept data secure. The Local Government Association for England and Wales declined [...]

Hackers are alleged to have destroyed a pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes in a US city in Illinois. Hackers with access to the utility’s network are thought to have broken the pump by turning it on and off quickly. The FBI and Department for Homeland Security (DHS) are investigating the incident as details emerge of what could be a separate second attack. Experts said the news revealed a growing interest in critical infrastructure by cyber criminals. [...]

A clerk at an east London court who made legal history by becoming the first defendant to be convicted under new wide-ranging bribery legislation is due to be sentenced. In exchange for £500, Munir Yakub Patel, 22, used his job as an administration clerk at Redbridge Magistrates’ Court to avoid putting details of a traffic summons offence on a court database. Patel was caught on camera by a national newspaper agreeing to take the action for Jayraj Singh, who had [...]

Southwark Council breached the Data Protection Act by misplacing a computer and some papers containing 7,200 peoples’ personal information which were discovered in a skip earlier this year, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said today. The computer and papers were mistakenly left at one of the council’s buildings at the Spa Road Complex in Southwark when it was vacated in December 2009. They were then discovered in June of this year and disposed of by the building’s new tenant. The [...]

Two-thirds of firms are at risk of security breaches because of erroneous changes being made to their security system, according to new research. Keeping firewalls and business software up to date is becoming an increasingly onerous task for the IT department, amid a cascade of patches, new vulnerabilities and changes to business processes. As a result, many systems intended to secure the enterprise are being updated incorrectly or inadequately, said Shaul Efraim, vice president of business development at Tufin Technologies. [...]

A lack of understanding of cyber security issues is holding business leaders back from forming a sufficient strategy against cyber crime. According to former GCHQ director Sir David Pepper, too many businesses are ignoring the immensity of cyber crime, and strong leadership from both government and industry is needed to protect the nation against criminals, hacktivists, cyber terrorists and espionage. Speaking at the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s annual Mountbatten Memorial Lecture, Pepper said many businesses are not spending enough [...]

Security ninja-pen tester David Kennedy shares an interesting snapshot of the healthcare industry and security breaches this year. The findings are not pretty. On his SecManiac site is an analysis where he digs through documented data breaches as chronicled on PrivacyRights.org — a site that keeps breach stats dating back to 2005. Looking at cases for this year alone, Kennedy finds that the health sector is the hardest hit in recent months. He writes: Doing some analysis of breaches this [...]

Valve has now confirmed that the hack of its Steam forums reported last week may have included the theft of credit card numbers. The company has emailed users saying that the intruders that defaced its forums also accessed a database which included “information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing information and encrypted credit card information.” Since the card data was encrypted, it may not be usable to the attackers, operating under the handle fkn0wned. [...]

A former gambling industry worker who unlawfully obtained and sold personal data relating to over 65,000 online bingo players has been found guilty of committing three offences under section 55 of the Data Protection Act. Marc Ben-Ezra, of Finchley, was given a three year conditional discharge and ordered to pay £1,700 to Cashcade Limited as well as £830.80 costs at Hendon Magistrates Court today. Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, said: “This case shows that the unlawful trade in personal information is [...]

Cyber criminals who are alleged to have made $14m (£9m) from advertising fraud have been arrested in Estonia. The FBI alleged that the gang infected more then four million computers in 100 countries with code that redirected users to online ads. The six arrested are Estonian nationals while the seventh member of the gang, a Russian, remains at large. Security firms hailed the arrests as the “biggest cyber criminal take down in history”. About 500,000 of the affected computers were [...]