Brian Donohue

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“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

Lost BP Laptop Contains Financial Information on Thousands of Gulf Oil Spill Victims

Almost a year has passed since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and spewed three months of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. But less than six months after the beleaguered oil giant managed to cap that well, it is contending with a new spill of a different sort: the loss of personal information on thousands of Gulf Coast residents who had filed claims for compensation stemming from the leak.


Yesterday we learned that Elizabeth Taylor, an American icon for some seven decades, died of congestive heart failure at 79. Today, Kaspersky Lab expert Dmitry Bestuzhev informs us that the news of her death is being exploited via social engineering scams on Twitter.

Greg Hoglund, CEO of HBGary, admits that lackluster security at his company played a central role in the breach that led to the release of some 50,000 company emails, but also disputes common understanding and reported details of the hack and the group behind it, going so far as to say there was actually no hack at all.

There has been no respite from the tsunami of scam-emails taking advantage of the natural disaster-nuclear meltdown combo punch that is hitting Japan, according to research from Kaspersky Labs.