Court orders one million pay restitution for Citibank credit card accounts theft
Graves also changed the home addresses of bank customers to New York addresses in order for Reid to be able to retrieve the goods she had purchased from high end retails stores, using the stolen accounts. Read more
Data Breach affecting ALDI stores’ payment terminals
Between June 1 and August 31 2010 illegal payment card terminals have apparently been placed in several ALDI stores by unauthorised individuals in order to obtain secured information. With the help of these terminals, private information such as name, card account and PIN number have been acquired.
According to ALDI sources, terminals in the following areas have been affected: Read more
Cyber gangs are taking over – street gangs will become obsolete
Cyber gangs appear to be one step ahead of e-crime experts.
UK Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, has stated that he believes police officers trained to fight against the growing number of cyber criminals are as vital as uniformed officers in the streets. In a letter to “The Sunday Telegraph” he outlines his beliefs that cutting back -office staff in favor of more street officers is wrong.
“Online fraud generated £52bn worldwide in 2007 – a staggering sum. There is a significant fight back by the financial institutions, working with police. In the Met, we play our part in a ‘Virtual Task Force’,” he said. Read more
7,000 CCNY Students Affected by Data Breach Exposing Sensitive Information
Panic grows among 7,000 students that are attending City College of New York as this week they have been notified by the school’s officials that a laptop theft may cause public exposure of their private details, including names and social security numbers.
The computer was stolen a couple of weeks ago, according to a post published by the Educational Security Incidents (ESI) blog. The data of the computer was not encrypted, but only password protected. CCNY officials found no evidence that any of the data has been used for identity theft or other illegal endeavors. Read more
Montefiore Medical Center: two computer thefts expose well over 23,000 private records
Two recent thefts of desktop computers belonging to the Montefiore Medical Center lead to the exposure of sestive information on patients and students stored by Montefiore’s Finance Department and School Health Program Administrative Offices.
The first incident happened in late May when two desktop computers were stolen from Montefiore’s Finance Department. The theft was discovered a couple of days later. Montefiore assessed the incident and concluded patient information had been stored on the computers, including patient names and medical record numbers. For some patients, the data stored also included social security numbers, dates of birth, hospital admission dates and/or insurer information.
Read more
CoSoSys offers enterprise level security via iPad and iPhone apps
Keeping your company or home computer network safe from day to day threats that could lead to data theft, data loss, identity theft or malware infections has never been easier. My Endpoint Protector, software as a service device control and data security solution developed by CoSoSys, is now offering an app version available for iPads, iPhones and iPod touch devices through the iTunes store.
With a few touches, you can use the app’s centralized console to authorize new devices, monitor file transfers and access to sensitive data and block portable devices, making sure all common threats are kept at bay. In a world where the unsecured use of portable storageand lifestyle devices – smartphones, notebooks, USB sticks, digital cameras or extern HDDs – can lead to tremendous data breaches and severe losses for both companies and individuals, having a smart and effective app at your fingertips preventing it all is extremely important. Read more
Senior execs love undermining security
When it comes to high-level executives, the rules of the game often change. They are used to ask for exceptions to be made for them, backdoors to be opened and a whole different set of rules to be applied. This is what turns them in one of the biggest threats to corporate security.
According to Jayson Street, CIO and managing partner of Stratagem 1 Solutions, senior executives often circumvent security rules and policies to suit their needs and whims at the expense of security. The negative effect is that the special treatment leads to enabling cybercriminals to easily gain access to corporate networks by impersonating as management personnel. That is why, because of their systems privilege and access rights, they become ideal targets for all those wanting to hack into corporate networks. Read more
Mix, match and send credit details to whoever
That’s what HM Revenue & Customs seems to be doing these days. They have taken the credit details of over 50,000 individuals claiming tax credits and mistakenly sent them out in the post. The result was that each one of the claimants has received their annual tax credit award notice, along with the private details of someone else.
Yearly earnings, parts of bank accounts, insurance numbers and names have all been sent out randomly to claimants. Yet the HMRC claims they will apologize and no IT theft could have resulted from this!
“Unfortunately an error has occurred in one of the tax credits print runs, causing some customer information to be wrongly formatted,” said a spokeswoman.
“Investigations are under way to identify the cause of the problem and we will be contacting affected customers in writing this week, apologising and providing a corrected award notice.”
Let’s hope that all claimants are moral, law abiding citizens and that the information is indeed to little to be used in any wrongful way! Yet the apology is still in order and a thorough analysis should follow the initial one that stated there were no ID theft risks!
LA Firemen’s Credit Union notifies 28,000 of potential breach
The 28,000 members of the Los Angeles Firemen’s Credit Union are in danger of having their private information exposed. The CU has recently notified them of a potential data breach generated by a file transfer. They believe that a small percentage of the members might be affected by an improper file move during the CU’s change of location.
Data that might have been compromised includes members names, addresses, phone numbers, account numbers, social security numbers and other identifiers. Mentioning their state of the art technology and protocols for member validation, the CU tried to reassure their members and diminish the impact. The truth of the matter is that there is enough information to compromise other accounts or memberships the affected individuals might have that do not have the very same technology.
The now very common measure to ensure free credit monitoring for two years is in place for the LA Firemen’s Credit Union members, along with a nice promice of practice review for future file transfers. Let’s all hope they don’t need it!
Identity fraud scheme targeting foster care and adoptive parents
In a new incident proving – as if more evidence was needed – that one of the biggest data security threats comes from the inside, an administrative tech of the Texas Child Protective Services in Houston decided to steal data on potential foster care and adoptive parents and use it to apply for credit cards. Together with an outside accomplice, they had used the stolen information to apply for said credit cards at various stores.
Luckily enough, the credit card issuers noticed some discrepancy in the way formed were filled out and the two were discovered and arrested after stealing data on only 70 individuals. The two accomplices charged with fraudulent possession of identifying information could face up to 10 years in prison and a 10,000 US dollar fine. Not quite worth it for some extra stolen cash that probably never came through.
As of now it is unclear if any of their identity theft attempts was successful. We do hope they have failed miserably.
