The city signed onto a $9 million upgrade of its 911 call centers this week that the Bloomberg administration says will greatly increase first responders' ability to receive and sort through emergency data.
The upgrade allows responders to bundle information from emergency calls and send it out to cops in the field and prosecutors in a courtroom if needed in a criminal investigation
While they present a wonderful opportunity to meet people with similar interests, sites like MySpace, Facebook, and even LinkedIn can also cause trouble.
Data on more than 5,000 ABN Amro customers has reportedly been found on the BearShare peer-to-peer network.
According to media reports, the compromised data had been stored on three spreadsheet files which contained personal information on more than 5,000 customers, including Social Security numbers.
The files were traced to a home computer in Florida reportedly owned by a former ABN Amro employee.
P2P systems have become increasingly dangerous for enterprises. The file-sharing services are part of a group of applications commonly referred to as 'greynets'.
An NHS trust is investigating how one of its hard drives containing confidential information was sold online.
The Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust is trying to find out how one of its computers full of confidential medical information was sold on eBay.
If there are any people left who think social networking is a safe place to enter your information I think this is a pretty telling story. Times Online has an interesting article on the latest move by Facebook regarding information that previously was inaccessible to search engines. Guess what? They’re going to make it publically accessible. It’s like people never learn (remind anyone of the AOL search query fun?). Okay - to be fair they said it’s only going to include, “basic details, including names and photographs” available.
German officials on Friday defended a proposal to use “Trojan horse” software to secretly monitor potential terror suspects’ Internet use and hard drives, according to an Associated Press story on USA Today.
Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is pushing the idea as part of a broader security law under consideration.
The proposal has come under sharp criticism from members of the police union and left-wing members of the ruling coalition, who have argued the practice would violate civil liberties laws, according to an Agence France-Presse story on IOL.
Internet hackers have stolen confidential data on 60,000 Norwegians, including the head of the agency for safeguarding them, the agency itself revealed Friday.
It said they had used a weakness on the website of the telephone operators Tele2 to procure the national personal identity numbers and addresses of subscribers, amounting to 1.3 percent of the country's population.
The information would enable the hackers to change the addresses of the people concerned so as to intercept their mail, or order goods on their account.
It never ceases to amaze me how seldom people seem to put any thought into how they use a new technology solution, or how open it may be to abuse of one kind or another; Take for example the current craze that is sweeping the globe, the phenomenon known as Facebook.
According to the Yale Daily News, Yale University alerted 10,000 current and past students, as well as 200 staff, that two computers stolen from the College Dean's Office July 17 contained their social security numbers.
While the theft does expose the students and staff to potential identify theft, campus representatives said that the computers were password-protected, that thieves most likely stole the computers to sell the hardware rather than the data, and stolen computers typically have their hard drives scrubbed to conceal their origin.
Corporate and government documents containing confidential — and sometimes classified — data are increasingly getting exposed through the use of peer-to-peer networks on computers holding the sensitive information.
The problem of inadvertent exposure of sensitive data on P2P networks is a “whole lot worse” than many government and corporate IT managers believe, said Eric Johnson, professor of operations management at the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business in Hanover, N.H.
