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Court Rules Email Accounts are Fair Game for Hackers
From: security curmudgeon <jericho () attrition org>
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 16:47:40 -0500 (CDT)
http://www.securitybistro.com/blog/?p=2608 Court Rules Email Accounts are Fair Game for Hackers Posted on October 16, 2012 by Anthony M. Freed Did you think your private correspondence stored by email providers like Google and Yahoo is safe from unauthorized access? Think again. In a devastating blow to privacy and the sanctity of proprietary data, the South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled that such data in not protected by the Stored Communications Act (SCA). In a landmark decision, the Court ruled that online email services do not fit the definition of "electronic storage" as spelled out by the SCA, and are therefore fair game for hackers and snoops. The decision was handed down last Wednesday in a lawsuit filed against a woman who had surreptitiously gained unauthorized access to an email account belonging to Lee Jennings, the plaintiff in the case. Under the SCA, electronic storage is defined as "any temporary, intermediate storage of a wire or electronic communication incidental to the electronic transmission thereof" and as being "any storage of such communication by an electronic communication service for the purposes of backup protection of such communication." The Justices ruled that since the correspondence in the plaintiff.s emails were not created for the purpose of backing up the data, the information does not warrant protection from intrusion under the Act. [..] _______________________________________________ Dataloss Mailing List (dataloss () datalossdb org) Archived at http://seclists.org/dataloss/ Unsubscribe at http://datalossdb.org/mailing_list Supporters: Risk Based Security (http://www.riskbasedsecurity.com/) Risk Based Security equips organizations with security intelligence, risk management services and on-demand security solutions to establish customized risk-based programs to address information security and compliance challenges. Tenable Network Security (http://www.tenable.com/) Tenable Network Security provides a suite of solutions which unify real-time vulnerability, event and compliance monitoring into a single, role-based, interface for administrators, auditors and risk managers to evaluate, communicate and report needed information for effective decision making and systems management.
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