Laptop With Anheuser-Busch Employees’ Private Data Stolen

Global beverage company Anheuser-Busch has recently released information on the theft of a laptop containing private records of current and former employees. The theft took place in June at an office from the St. Louis area.

Tim Farrell, the company’s vice president for corporate human resources, quoted by DailyPress.com said Anheuser-Busch sent letters to an undisclosed number of employees and ex-employees letting them know what had happened. As the stolen laptop contained Social Security numbers, home addresses and marital status, the company also offered a year of free credit reporting. According to the same source, the private records stored on the stolen computer was password-protected and encrypted.

Banks Prefered by Fraudsters in 2008

It looks like fraudsters have a thing for banks and have been showing this affinity in the first six months of the year. This is the conclusion of the latest Fraud Barometer released KPMG Forensic’s.

According to the barometers quoted by CRN UK, fraud has increased by 50 percent, generating 630 million pounds for fraudsters. Banks toped in losses, reporting a record amount of 350 million, with 128 fraud cases coming to court. The most frequent types of fraud were mortgage fraud, and accounting and employee frauds.

KPMG also released dark predictions for the future, stating that the figures they released are most likely to get worse, one of the causes being the full impact of the credit crunch.

Stay Clear of Computer Threats on Vacation and Business Trips

And how exactly can you do that? CoSoSys has just released version 3.0 of Carry it Easy +Plus which focuses on increased security for security for USB flash drive users that access their data on public PCs like in internet cafés or hotel business centers.

Carry it Easy +Plus 3.0 has a whole range of features on display that are great for road warrior or the luckier ones of us who are vacationing: Website Password Manager, PC-Screen Lock128 bit AES data encryption, Outlook e-mail, contact and calendar sync, File & Folder Sync, No Trace Internet Browsing and much more.

So why do you need such tight security? The official release explains it:

When vacationing or travelling for business, the simplest technology-bound actions on your daily routine can expose you to real threats. Accessing your webmail account in an Internet café or on a different public PC you might run across in hotel business lounges or in airports exposes you to having your login credentials stolen by keyloggers or other malicious applications. The same can happen when plugging in your notebook in an unsecured network.

With the new SafeLogin feature in Carry it Easy +Plus as your password manager, all your website login credentials are stored securely in encrypted format on your portable storage device and automatically entered on any PC without the use of a keyboard. This feature does not only make logging in secure but also more convenient.

US Federal Agencies Welcome Data Theft

After 15 months of investigation into 24 major US federal agencies, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has release a report showing that key US Departments still don’t take data security seriously. Given the list of breaches we’ve been covering affecting everyone from colleges and hospitals to the US Army, I’d say it’s high time they started!

According to the report quoted by Vnunet.com, around 70 percent of laptops and handhelds used by agency failed to comply with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rules and didn’t use encryption making the data available to anyone intending to steal it. The OMB rules are not even close to being new, as they decided all federal laptops should be encrypted back in 2007.

“We are recommending that OMB clarify governmentwide encryption policy to address agency efforts to plan for and implement encryption technologies,” said the report.

“We are also making recommendations to selected agencies to properly install and configure FIPS-compliant encryption technologies, to develop policies and procedures to manage encryption, and to provide encryption training to personnel.”

Other practices of extremely low levels of security (or should we say non-existent security) include Nasa employees refusing to deploy encryption software on their laptops and members of the Department of Education who weren’t told encryption software was installed so they of course weren’t using it. From what I know if they’re using Windows, whenever a new program is installed, you have a quite nagging message in your Startup Menu. How patient must one be to simply ignore it over and over again

Hackers Looking to Chat or Spam Expose 2,800 to Identity Theft

Another security breach involving a college has recently been reported. While trying to set up chat rooms or establish a spam sending headquarters from themselves, a group of hackers broke into a library consortium that serves Connecticut College, Trinity College and Wesleyan University.

According to consortium sources quoted by Courant.com, the two breached servers were ocated at the consortium’s headquarters at Wesleyan and were used to store a database belonging to all three colleges. The database included the names, addresses and Social Security or driver’s license numbers of about 2,800 Connecticut College library patrons, 12 Wesleyan University patrons and three from Trinity.

There’s no evidence that personal information was stolen, but affected individuals will be mailed letters with information on how to enroll in an identity protection service. All personal information has been deleted from the database and steps were taken to secure the servers.