Mark Dalby

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has found a school in Hampshire in breach of the Data Protection Act (DPA) after the personal details of nearly 20,000 people were put at risk when the school’s website was hacked.

According to an undertaking signed by Bay House School, computer hackers, including at least one of its own pupils, accessed the school’s internal information management system via an attack on the school’s remotely-hosted website.

In March, hackers gained access to the system after discovering that a member of staff used the same password to log into the school’s web and management systems. Despite Bay House School having a policy in place to prohibit the use of duplicate passwords, the school did not have checks in place to ensure the policy was adhered to.

Britain’s best-selling newspaper, The Sun, has warned that thousands of people who participated in competitions on its website might have had their personal information stolen.

Names, postal addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and email addresses are believed to be amongst the stolen information.

According to reports, the data was stolen at the same time as The Sun’s website was hacked earlier this month by the LulzSec gang, who posted a bogus story announcing the death of Rupert Murdoch. Some of the private information about members of the public has been posted online, including applications for the Miss Scotland beauty contest, which includes details of potential contestants’ aspirations, vital statistics, hair and eye colour, weight, and height.

Newline Software announced the release of OPTIC, Online Privacy Technology In the Cloud. The solution allows developers to securely query, write, and read encrypted data to and from any cloud data store (e.g. Amazon S3, Windows Azure) without the cloud having any knowledge of that data.

Encrypted data stored in the cloud can only be decrypted by applications on the client device. With OPTIC developers can create solutions with 100% data privacy in the cloud.

Current secure cloud applications encrypt data with a key and store the data as a ‘blob’ in the cloud, or a single large collection of data. This does not allow granular access to or querying for the existence of data in the cloud. This presents a problem because these applications need to create and manage local catalogs to reference encrypted data.

South Korea has blamed Chinese hackers for stealing data from 35 million accounts on a popular social network.

The attacks were directed at the Cyworld website as well as the Nate web portal, both run by SK Telecom. Hackers are believed to have stolen phone numbers, email addresses, names and encrypted information about the sites’ many millions of members.

It follows a series of recent cyber attacks directed at South Korea’s government and financial firms. Details of the breach were revealed by the Korean Communications Commission. It claimed to have traced the source of the incursion back to computer IP addresses based in China.