The response to Sony’s PlayStation Network hack has now reached an unprecedented scale, with reports that the US Department of Homeland Security will join in investigating the breach.
“DHS’ U. S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team [US-CERT] is working with law enforcement, international partners and Sony to assess the situation,” spokesman Chris Ortman told NextGov. US-CERT is part of the National Cyber Security Division in the department, and coordinates a response to security threats.
State broadcaster, TVNZ, is reporting that a New Zealand man has gained access to personal information, including names and social security numbers, of American soldiers after buying an MP3 player, which cost him $18, from a thrift shop in Oklahoma.
The Ministry of Defence in the UK has admitted that another laptop with "sensitive information" has been stolen while one of its officials checked out of Britannia Adelphi in Liverpool’s city centre on Thursday. This comes after the Ministry was forced to admit that it had lost 658 laptops between 2004 and 2007. This now brings the total to 659.
Britain’s tax and customs service has lost banking and personal data of 25 million people – nearly half of the entire 60 million population in the UK – when 2 computer hard drive disks were missing on their way to a government audit office in an internal mail service.
The US jobs website, Monster, has now questions to answer after it had lost hundreds and thousands of users data by an online attack.
A computer program was used to access the employers’ section using stolen data. Symantec, which warned Monster about the attack, said that “the log-ins were used to harvest user names, e-mail addresses, home addresses and phone numbers, which were uploaded to a remote web server.”