In 2014, attackers targeted many organisations and servers to hack into the system to steal the data. User privacy has been exploited in numerous attacks that happened during the last one year. Many responsible authorities and chairpersons were fired during the process. Today we have listed eight such data breaches that costed someone their job!
1. Target
The massive data breach that happened at Target in last year affected over 50 million customers and 46 per cent loss in profit. Two of the executive level officers, Beth Jacob, CIO of Target and Gregg Steinhafel, CEO of Target resigned after the incident. Beth Jacob resigned shortly after the incident while, Gregg Steinhafel resigned later in May of this month.
2. Maricopa County Community College District
Maricopa county community college reported that over 2.5 million current and former students, employees and vendors were affected by hackers. These hackers penetrated computer defence infrastructure. They compromised names, birthdates, driver license numbers, social security numbers, bank details of people. The director of Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) was fired shortly after by voting process in July 2014.
3. Texas State Comptroller’s Office
Large number of information security executives were fired by Texas State Comptroller’s office after reported data leak that exposed social security, driver license numbers, name and addresses of 3.2 million citizen in Texas. The data was supposed to be in encrypted manner however, the information executives were careless enough to keep the data in an unencrypted format.
4. Utah State Department of Technology Service
Hackers from Eastern Europe hacked the server at Utah Department of Health to breach the data of thousands of Medicaid records in April 2012. The server was reportedly compromised on Friday and the data was stolen on Sunday night. The head of Department of Technology Services (DTS) Stephen Fletcher was fired after the incident. The governor of Utah apologized the citizens.
5. Accretive Health
The data containing social security numbers and other personal data was stolen from parked rental car of Accretive Health employee. The laptop was unencrypted. The laptop contained sensitive information of over 23,000 patients. However no personal health records were breached as only names were available in the data. The employee was fired as he had not encrypted the data.
6. Goold Health Systems
The Goold Health Systems employee had downloaded the patient reports data on USB drive against company policy and he later lost the USB stick during his journey between Salt Lake City, Denver and Washington D.C. The data was unencrypted hence, it was easily compromised. Goold’s CEO claims that employee unknowingly violated the policy. She was later fired for her irresponsible behaviour.
7. Highmark Inc
Highmark reported that the personal medical information of over 3,700 Medicare Advantage members has been disclosed without the proper authorization. A small error by a mailroom employee resulted in number of members receiving the result of risk assessment, the breached information included personal data, names, addresses, birth dates, medical information and identification numbers. The mail room employee was fired for his irresponsible behaviour.
8. MDF Transcription
MDF Transcription company associated with Boston Medical Centre in Massachusetts mistakenly posted the personal health records, names and addresses of over 15,000 patients to third party vendor’s website with no password protection. Boston Medical Centre fired this third-party vendor MDF Transcription for irresponsible behaviour.
