Hacked, Personal Data | featured news

A single malicious email sent to workers at the South Carolina Department of Revenue last August enabled an international hacker to gain access to 3.8 million tax returns.

South Carolina Governer Nikki Haley announced Friday that, “This is not a good day for South Carolina.” The bad news was having to admit a massive security breach in the State’s Department of Revenue that resulted in the theft of 3.6 million social security numbers and 387,000 credit/debit card numbers (only 16,000 of which, it is believed, were unencrypted,) This incident affects more than three-quarters of South Carolina’s 4.6 million population.

Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest bookseller, said data thieves hacked into payment devices at 63 of its stores nationwide and may have stolen credit and debit card information from customers.

Phandroid has announced that a hacker has recently accessed its user database, making off with usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords—and the problem looks like it could affect all of its one million-plus users.

The company said that although the breached accounts include user names from Yahoo and other companies, only 5% of the accounts had valid passwords. Yahoo said it is working to fix the vulnerability and is changing the passwords of the affected users. The company also said it is notifying other companies whose users may have been affected -- earlier we reported that they may include people who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and many others.

Yahoo has been the victim of a security breach that yielded hundreds of thousands of login credentials stored in plain text. The hacked data, posted to the hacker site D33D Company, contained more than 453,000 login credentials and appears to have originated from the Web pioneer's network. The hackers, who said they used a union-based SQL injection technique to penetrate the Yahoo subdomain, intended the data dump to be a "wake-up call."

Yahoo Inc. said Thursday it is investigating reports of a security breach that may have exposed nearly half a million users' email addresses and passwords... The little-known group was quoted as saying that they had stolen the passwords using an SQL injection -- the name given to a commonly-used attack in which hackers use rogue commands to extract data from vulnerable websites.

A Russian hacker claims to have uploaded almost 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords, The Verge reports. LinkedIn in says in a tweet that "Our team is currently looking into reports of stolen passwords. Stay tuned for more."

Hackers affiliated with the Anonymous hacking group obtained more than 150 police officers' personal information from an old website for the West Virginia Chiefs of Police Association and posted...

Personal details about Tony Blair that appear online were apparently not hacked from the former British prime minister's computer systems, but from the email account of a former staffer.