AN investigation is under way after hackers managed to infiltrate phone systems at a Bodmin hospital, a St Austell doctors' surgery and could have heard confidential medical details of patients.
Phone systems at Bodmin NHS Treatment Centre and Polkyth Surgery in St Austell were both hacked into by people trying to use the systems to make their own calls.
Computers have made it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview. A lost cell phone can expose personal photos or text messages. A legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating, inconvenient or just embarrassing details from the past.
Competition between social networks is compromising the protection of users data, according to research by Cambridge University.
It looked at the measures taken by 45 networks to protect user data and found 71% reserved the right to share data with third parties, while 80% failed to use standard encryption protocols in order to protect sensitive data from hackers.
The researchers said competition was deterring social networks from clearly stating their privacy guidelines because it’s deemed that any conversation about privacy puts users off using social networks.
Facebook is under fire because of its privacy settings, with Canadian officials criticizing the No. 1 social networking site, demanding changes to how the site operates for Canadian users.
The Canadian privacy commission believes the social networking site offers "confusing or incomplete information to subscribers." Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart agreed Facebook has made some changes, but said there are still major privacy gaps that must be fixed immediately.
They sometimes call national security the third rail of politics. Touch it and, politically, you're dead.
The cliché doesn't seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein's new book, "Wiring up the Big Brother Machine ... and Fighting It." It's an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans.
The University of California-San Diego's Moores Cancer Center has sent letters alerting 30,000 patients that hackers breached the center's computers on June 26 and might have gained access to their personal data, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
DeAnn Marshall, UCSD Health Sciences chief of marketing and communications, said the compromised information included names, birth dates, medical record numbers, and diagnosis and treatment dates (Martinez, San Diego Union-Tribune, 7/16).
“Misty Buttons” just started following me on Twitter. She’s a curvaceous bodacious and seemingly oppressed follower who isn’t getting her needs met. She apparently needs me to meet those needs. It is of course a tempting offer that someone, somewhere may accept. I’m going to pass. Twitter porn and cyber crime are one in the same. Criminal hackers are using porn lure unsuspecting “twits” into their lair, distributing malicious software and getting the pent-up to enter credit card data. In some cases they deserve to be scammed.
Etisalat, the carrier responsible for bringing the BlackBerry solution to the United Arab Emirates, released a very suspect official update. A member on the official support forums did some detective work, and found some suspicious code in the update. According to the user:
“Blackberry subscribers for Etisalat (one of the official service providers in the UAE) received a WAP Push to download a JAR named “registration”
The description of the “update” was as follows: “Etisalat network upgrade for Blackberry service. Please download to ensure continuous service quality.”
New York's attorney general says that Tagged.com stole the identities of more than 60 million internet users worldwide - by sending emails that raided their private accounts. Andrew Cuomo said he plans to sue the social networking website for deceptive marketing and invasion of privacy.
"This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people," Cuomo said in a statement. "Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologise to all their email contacts for Tagged's unethical - and illegal - behaviour."
New information has come to light about warrantless wiretapping during the Bush years.
In a new report, five inspectors general say only three Justice Department lawyers knew of the eavesdropping plan. When other officials became aware of the program, they questioned its legality and people nearly resigned en masse.
Much of the rest of the review – mandated last year by Congress – is classified.
