Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Senate Hopeful Coleman Deals With Donor Data Breach

by Peter Mychalcewycz on March 15, 2009 at 12:39 PM

Senate candidate Norm Coleman has a massive, self-inflicted headache to deal with after the personal information for thousands of his donors' was leaked in January.

Supporters were notified, not by the Coleman campaign (which had known about the security breach since January), but via an e-mail from the nonprofit Wikileaks site on Tuesday. Cullen Sheehan, Coleman's campaign manager, sent out an e-mail the next day urging all registered donors to cancel their credit cards. Coleman's camp insists that the leak was due to "sloppy handling by the Coleman campaign" and not hacking. Whew, what a relief!

Being viewed as sloppy should be the least of their worries -- according to Minnesota Statute 325E.61, any person affected by just such a breach of security should be notified as soon as possible after an incident takes place. We find it extremely interesting that Coleman, who is in a bitter legal battle with Democratic Challenger Al Franken and is extremely reliant on donations, would choose not to alert his supporters immediately after such a massive security breach. Coleman's camp says it didn't notify people about the breach because it determined that no unauthorized sources had accessed the leaked info.

We are sure that makes everyone involved feel much better, especially the people whose credit card numbers, complete with security codes, have been floating around in cyber space. [From: CNET]

Related Links:

Tags: coleman, credit card fraud, credit cards, CreditCardFraud, CreditCards, leak, politics, security, security breach, SecurityBreach

Comments

1

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular