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Canada Privacy Breaches: More Than A Million Canadians May Have Had Data Compromised
From: Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com>
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2013 18:43:29 -0400
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/04/23/canada-privacy-breach-charlie-angus_n_3142560.html OTTAWA — More than a million Canadians may have had their private information compromised by data breaches within the federal government over the last ten years, an analysis by The Huffington Post Canada suggests. Prompted by a question from NDP MP Charlie Angus, the government was forced to acknowledge this week that at the very least, there were 1,072,999 instances where a Canadian’s private information held by various departments and agencies was lost, stolen or accessed by an unauthorized third party. In a stack of documents tabled in the House of Commons Monday, the government admitted it has recorded more than 3,134 data and privacy breaches between 2002 and 2012 across all departments — although many departments only counted data breaches within the last two to five years. Of the total breaches, only 399 were reported to Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart. “You have a million people whose privacy has been breached under this government’s watch,” Charlie Angus told HuffPost Tuesday. “It looks like the Privacy Commissioner has been kept in the dark through most of it — and the government doesn’t seem to know how many people have been affected. That is the concerning part of it.” According to federal legislation, the government is not obliged to tell Canadians if their personal information has been breached. Departments are also not required to inform the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. It appears the federal government may have tried to lowball the number of Canadians affected. Public Works only reported that 501 individuals were affected by breaches at the department. The total number of individuals actually affected, when one counts each case individually, was 348,061. Public Works failed to count a case where it inadvertently forwarded a file containing the unencrypted social insurance numbers of 332,560 individuals to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). The department also didn't count a case involving 15,000 people whose names, dates of birth and unscrambled social insurance numbers were handed over on a CD to a subcontractor who should not have had access to the data. ... _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
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- Canada Privacy Breaches: More Than A Million Canadians May Have Had Data Compromised Jeffrey Walton (Apr 24)