Privacy

Budget hotel chain Travelodge has seen its customers subjected to phishing attacks in an apparent breach of its customer database.

The company warned potential victims of the attacks in a letter, which stated: "Our main priority is to ensure the security of our customer data, which is why I wanted to make you aware that a small number of you may have received a spam email via the email address you have registered with us."

An underground hacking group has leaked what appears to be an address book of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The address book contains about 60 entries including names and addresses allegedly "friends, and family" of the former PM along with contacts allegedly of members of parliament.

It also allegedly included Blair's National Insurance Number. Eve Kay, a Queensland woman listed on the address book confirmed during a telephone call to SC that she was linked to Blair through her niece who was an assistant to the then PM.

LulzSec announced Thursday evening the publication at Pirate Bay of a trove of leaked material from Arizona law enforcement agencies. Arizona's Department of Public Safety confirmed shortly thereafter that it was hacked. In the press release included with the dump, a LulzSec affiliate outlines a more activist agenda than is usually associated with the group.

Staples stores in Canada have some explaining to do after a government audit found evidence that the office supply chain was violating Canadian privacy law by selling used computers and storage drives that still contained data belonging to the previous owner.

Sony Pictures France is the latest Sony Web site to suffer at the hands of hackers. This time two hackers have claimed credit and say they copied more than 177,000 e-mails from the site.

The two hackers are identified as a Lebanese student called “Idahc” and “Auth3ntiq,” a friend of his from France. They claim to have exploited a SQL flaw to get the information. Idahc and Auth3ntic posted information about their feat, along with a sample of the e-mails they took, to the Web site Pastebin.com.

The "exclusively for beautiful people" dating site BeautifulPeople.com has reported a hack on its site that allowed as many as 30,000 "less than pretty" candidates to join it.

Advertising itself as the "largest most exclusively beautiful community in the world", BeautifulPeople.com reported that it was hit by a "Shrek" virus that compromised its vetting software, allowing a wave of "sub-standard" applicants to join the dating site.

Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into Google for allegedly violating the country's privacy laws through the data collected for the Internet company's Street View service, newspapers reported Thursday.

The investigation, being handled by Rome public prosecutor Eugenio Albamonte, was opened at the request of the national Privacy Authority and on the basis of information provided by Google.

Sega has become the latest gaming company to fall victim to digital ne'er-do-wells, with the company's Sega Pass system having been cracked wide open by forces unknown.

In an e-mail to members, Sega admits that recent downtime on the service - which has been unavailable since yesterday - was caused by a security breach. "Over the last 24 hours we have identified that unauthorised entry was gained to our Sega Pass database," the e-mail reads.



Automatic Data Processing (ADP) today disclosed that it has suffered a system intrusion that it believes has impacted only one client associated with Workscape, the benefits administration platform company it acquired.