False security: Is Bank of America lying to its customers?
25491
A bank that guarantees its online users safety and security has direct evidence that its Web-based banking system is not bullet-proof. Should that bank tells its users?
228635
A whopping 70% of respondents say they&#39;ve been duped, and 15% admit to revealing personal information. By Thomas Claburn. Phishing could cost consumers $500 million this year, according to a new study conducted
611939
New threat: Phishing attempts that ask the victim to call their bank to reactivate a credit card, then provide a false phone number.
434215
(InfoWorld) - Contrary to popular perception, computer data breaches are less likely to result in identity theft and other fraud than off-line causes such as lost or stolen wallets and checkbooks. That was the finding of a year-long study of about 5,000 U.S. consumers by Pleasanton, Calif.-based analyst firm Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin's research showed that despite recent hype, data breaches were responsible for just 6 percent of all known cases of identity theft, compared to 30 percent from incidents like losing one's wallet. The study also showed that less than 1 percent of all individuals whose data was lost later became victims of ID theft. Javelin's results are similar to those found by other firms that have looked at the relationship between data breaches and actual instances of ID fraud. In a Gartner study in 2005, for instance, only 18 percent of identity theft victims attributed the cause to computer breaches, while 41 percent cited off-line causes. Similarly, a December 2005 analysis by ID Analytics Inc. of four major online data breaches involving 500,000 customer records showed that less than 1 percent of those affected had their identities stolen. The numbers are important at a time when a spate of data breach disclosures has heightened consumer concerns and is fueling a debate among lawmakers about the need for more stringent data protection laws, analysts said. "There is a misperception that there is a one-to-one correlation between a data breach and ID theft," said Thomas Oscherwitz, vice president of government affairs and chief privacy officer at San Diego-based ID Analytics. In reality, "the mere fact that you are part of a data breach doesn't mean that you are a victim of ID theft," he said. The degree of risk can depend on the type of breach, Oscherwitz said. Data breaches involving a deliberate hacking, for instance, are likely to be much more risky than those involving a lost disk or laptop, he said. Failing to make such distinctions can push consumers to undertake unnecessary efforts to protect themselves and can impose burdens on corporations, said Mary Monahan, author of the Javelin study. "Our opinion is that consumers do need to be protected by data breach laws, and we do want to see a federal law to protect all consumers," Monahan said. But given the low risk of ID theft from such breaches, any such law would need to give the breached entity the opportunity to conduct a risk assessment before they are required to disclose it publicly; The absence of such a trigger could result in indiscriminate notifications. "And then all you get is white noise" that few people pay attention to, Monahan said. Currently, many of the 30-plus states that have breach disclosure laws require companies to notify customers of any data breach involving the potential compromise of personally identifiable information. Several industry groups have been lobbying lawmakers for a preemptive federal law that would add some sort of a breach notification trigger that is based on an assessment of the risk of ID theft or other fraud. Privacy advocates, on the other hand, have been arguing for broad disclosure, saying that few companies are likely to publicly notify consumers of a breach if they are allowed to make their own risk assessments. "I think it's always going to be difficult to make a conclusive cause-and-effect relationship between ID theft and data breaches," said Andrew Jacquith, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston. So the real emphasis of any national legislation has to be on measures that companies need to take to protect sensitive customer data, he said. Also important is the need to examine issues like the continuing use of Social Security numbers as identifiers by a large number of companies, Jacquith said. "I view nonpublic information as radioactive material that needs to be protected [from leaks]," he said. "It's material that you can use to manufacture identities with."
731737
Apparently it&#39;s not just unwary individuals that fall victim to online scammers. Even large corporations, it seems, can get suckered into parting with their money by devious&#160;phishers.Case in point: Eden Prairie, MN.-based grocery chain Supervalu, which earlier this year got conned into depositing more than $10 million into two fraudulent bank accounts before recognizing the ruse. Details of the case are contained in court documents filed in connection with two forfeiture cases stemming from the incident.According to federal court filings in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, the fraudulent activity took place in late February and early March this year. In the court filings, Stephen Kilgroff, Supervalu&#39;s vice president of legal affairs, said that on February 26 and 28 the company received two separate e-mails, one purporting to be from an employee at American Greetings Corp. and the second from an employee at Frito-Lay, both company-approved vendors.Both e-mails told Supervalu to send future payments for each vendor to new bank account numbers. In the case of the e-mail that purported to be from American Greetings Corp., Supervalu was advised to send payments to an HSBC account in Miami. The other e-mail advised Supervalu to send Frito-Lay payments to an account at First Security Bank in Rogers, Arkansas.Between Feb 28 and March 3, Supervalu deposited just over $6.5 million via multiple wire-transfers to the HSBC account, thinking that it was sending the money to American Greetings Corp. Similarly, on March 2 it made eight separate wire-transfers to the bank in Arkansas, depositing a total of $3.6 million to an account it thought belonged to Frito-Lay.In addition to the $6.5 million deposited by Supervalu into the HSBC account, an additional amount of $500,000 had been deposited into the same account by a second company, identified as &quot;ROHM&quot; on court documents. No information has been available concerning the second company, and it is not a party to subsequent litigation.Around March 6, according to the filings made by Kilgroff, Supervalu discovered that it had been &quot;induced&quot; into making the transfers to the bogus accounts. Following the discovery of the fraud, Supervalu quickly notified the appropriate law enforcement authorities, who managed to recover nearly all of the money before it could be withdrawn from the accounts.The recovered money is now being claimed by Frito-Lay, American Greetings and Supervalu. In making the claim to the recovered money, Frito-Lay said that it believes the money belongs to Supervalu and said supported that company&#39;s claim to ownership of the misdirected funds.&quot;However to the extent there is any determination that the ownership of these funds changed from Albertsons/Supervalu [the Albertsons grocery chain was recently acquired by Supervalu] to Frito-Lay (as a result of the attempted transfer, the misdirection, or any other development) Frito-Lay makes this claim to these funds in the alternative and subject to any claim of ownership by Albertsons/Supervalu&quot; the company said in an affidavit.A federal judge is expected to rule sometime in November on which firm should receive the recovered funds.A spokeswoman from Supervalu responded via e-mail to a request for comment. &quot;As indicated by the forfeiture complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney&#39;s Office in Boise, Supervalu was the target of attempted financial fraud,&quot; spokeswoman Haley Meyer said. &quot;Due to our internal controls and processes, we were able to quickly discover and report this to the FBI. As a result of the quick work of the Boise FBI Office and the U.S. Attorney, any funds lost are minimal.&quot;Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
136881
Avoiding the false economy trap Reg Tech Panel â¦
402846
Online merchants in the United States have become better at weeding out fraudulent credit card orders, a new survey indicates. But shipping overseas remains a risky venture. By Joanna Glasner.
682011
The FBI is looking for suspects in a scam that uses bomb threats to extort money from banks and stores, officials told CNN. For the past week, banks and stores in 12 states have been hit by the scam, in which a caller claims there is a bomb that can be detonated if workers don't wire money to a specific account.
660386
InfoWorld - Bank of America customers can now use their mobile phones to&#160;make online banking more secure.
635768
Bank of America's optional SafePass service works with customers' mobile phones to improve security for online banking.
558593
What a surprise -- credit card issuers aren't exactly playing nice.
251819
When it comes to credit card abuse, your wallet may not be the only victim.
147381
Small banks fed up with footing the bill for other companies' security leaks support the effort. But what does it mean for consumers?
632083
(InfoWorld) - Hackers are trying to play on business' fear of legal action from customers to trick them into downloading a harmful program distributed through e-mail. The e-mails purport to come from the Better Business Bureau, an organization that monitors and arbitrates disputes between consumers and businesses in the U.S. and Canada. The e-mails assert that a customer lodged a complaint against the recipient's business, according to a warning on the Web site of Websense, a security vendor. The e-mails contain aÂ Microsoft WordÂ attachmentÂ with the text of the supposed complaint and instructions for how to respond. But embedded in that document is a keylogging program that captures data on the victim's computer and then uploads it to a server in Malaysia. The keylogger is purposely mislabeled with a ".pdf" extension -- Portable Document Format -- another widely used document format, to make it look harmless, said Henry Gonzalez, Websense's senior security researcher. The trick is another variation of so-called "social engineering" methods used by hackers, which entice users to unknowingly install harmful programs on their computers. A Better Business Bureau branch warned of a similar kind of attack in February. At that time, the e-mails contained hyperlinks to malicious Web sites. Some kinds of malicious software can be installed on a user's computer merely by viewing a site engineered to exploit a vulnerability within a Web browser. The latest attack, using the Word document as the delivery vehicle for the malicious software, is a tactic hackers are increasingly employing. Â ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
614949
Rich Baich knows about data theft. Back in 2005, Baich was where he is now: at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, a published author and star in the tight-knit community of information security experts. Then the roof fell in as Baich's employer, data broker ChoicePoint, revealed that it had unwittingly allowed identity thieves posing as legitimate customers to make off with the financial records of more than 163,000 consumers.
80317
By Elwin Green, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette  Feb. 4--This week's scam may be inoperative by the time you read this,  but on the Internet, one never knows.   The senders of the e-mail pose as BB&T Co., the Raleigh-Durham,  N.C.-based bank.
753224
Users of banking sites just don't pay attention, which may mean that anti-fraud measures such as HTTPS indicators don't help to protect them. The Harvard-MIT study delivering the discoveries this week was mainly composed of users under 30 -- stereotypically the most Net-savvy group around.