Credit Issuer Says Data Lost for 650,000 Customers
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A computer tape containing personal data of 650,000 customers of about 230 retailers including J.C. Penney is missing, credit card issuer GE Money said on Friday.
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A computer tape containing personal data of 650,000 customers of about 230 retailers including J.C. Penney Co is missing, credit card issuer GE Money said on Friday.
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ID theft milestone reached The total number of US customer records compromised as a result of security blunders has hit the 100m milestone.â¦
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HM Revenue and Customs admits losing the details of 6,500 customers of a pension firm at its Cardiff offices.
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Blog: Past and current employees are affected by a third-party tape loss.
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The personal details of up to 600,000  people were lost when a Royal Navy officer's laptop was stolen  in the latest embarrassment to hit British Prime Minister  Gordon Brown.
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Here we go again. The Department of Veterans Affairs has disclosed that information on more than half a million individuals and about 1.3 million non-VA physicians -- both living and deceased -- is missing and may have been stolen. The information had been stored on a portable hard drive that was...
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A missing unencrypted tape containing 650,000 retail credit-card accounts has gone missing, affecting 230 US retailers.
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Business & money: Ill-judged comments saw deluge of customers reclaiming bank charges, says lawyer
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US consumers made more than 600,000 complaints of fraud in 2004 with two in five concerning ID theft, official figures suggest.
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A check-authorizing company said yesterday that credit, bank account, and other personal information on 2.3 million consumers had been stolen, but none of the data were used for identity theft or other financial fraud.
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Even more worried than Americans One in five (22 per cent) European businesses expect to have to cope with "major data loss" of some sort annually over the next five years compared to 10 per cent of their US counterparts.â¦
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US consumers and businesses have lost an estimated 500 million dollars to a relatively new Internet scam known as &quot;phishing,&quot; according to a survey released this week.
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Database administrator hustles info to marketeers Fidelity National Information Services, the major US financial processing company, said today a senior level database administrator at one of its subsidiaries stole 2.3 million consumer records containing bank account and credit card information as well as other personal information.â¦
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Thousands of Wells Fargo mortgage and student-loan customers may be at risk for identity theft after four computers were stolen last month from a vendor that prints loan statements.
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American Express has recently suffered considerable damage as around 20 thousand US banks could not use AE cards. &quot;Consumers have been damaged by the boycott by being deprived of competitive alternatives,&quot; said
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The huge losses reported by French bank Soci?t? G?n?rale, apparently caused by a rogue trader with inside knowledge of the bank's procedures, don't necessarily point to an IT systems failure but rather to poor management of those systems, analysts say.The bank has accused 31-year-old employee Jerome Kerviel of creating a fraudulent trading position in the bank's computers that ultimately caused it to lose around ?4.9 billion ($7.3 billion).Kerviel achieved this by, among other things, misappropriating computer passwords, the bank said. It has revealed few other technical details of what caused the losses.Management of passwords, including rescinding the old passwords of employees who move to different positions within the bank, or modifying the level of access those passwords allow, is often a task given to the lowest-level IT worker."It's dull and routine 99 percent of the time, but a vital backstop," said Bob McDowall, senior analyst at the TowerGroup. Senior IT managers should conduct more frequent reviews of password policies, he said.In some cases, it may not have been the security of the passwords themselves that posed a problem, but rather the access those passwords allowed, said Ian Walden, professor of information and communications law at Queen Mary, University of London.Organizations tend to think of access as being binary in nature: you get access to it all, or you don't, Walden said. In reality, there are many more levels of access. "In modern, complicated systems, the granularity has to be much more sophisticated."To make the best use of systems with advanced access controls, the IT department must have a thorough understanding of how the business works and where there is risk.IT departments and business managers have yet to find a way to wrap security into business processes so it is not an impediment, Walden said."IT in a company is not given a sufficient status," Walden said. "What's shocking is you would have thought that the financial sector was more sophisticated than this, but it still tends to be the case that security is an add-on and a block, something you've got to live with but you don't have to like, rather than being viewed as an integral part of the business structure."Workers should be able to do their job without having to share passwords when someone goes on holiday, and the IT department should not make it harder for people to perform their duties, Walden said.In one extreme example at telecommunications company BT, one employee didn't have the right to use a computer at all, but he found it helped him do his job, Walden said."By the time he was found, he had 90 passwords of different employees," Walden said.It's possible that financial institutions could use biometric systems, such as fingerprint scanners, to provider an added layer of security, McDowall said. Those systems, however, are expensive. Also, the sometimes-finicky fingerprint scanners may not be appropriate in a frantic trading environment, McDowall said.Questions remain about how Kerviel's losses could be so high given his job as relatively low-level trader. But Kerviel's career progression in 2005 from the bank's back office to the front office -- where he would have had access to client accounts -- is also troubling since he would have gained greater knowledge on the bank's inner controls, McDowall said.As an arbitrage trader, Kerviel made money off price differences between different financial products. Soci?t? G?n?rale said Kerviel balanced real and fake trades in order to avoid setting off internal alarms.Kerviel has been described in some press reports as a computer genius. However, most attackers used unsophisticated methods for exploiting systemic vulnerabilities in applications, processes and procedures, according to the 2005 "Insider Threat Study" by Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute.That report notes that sophisticated tools are also used in some attacks, which would demand that internal financial systems need to be designed on a more defensive footing.Programmers should code under the assumption that a hacker or employee will use every means in order to break in, said Ben Rothke, senior security consultant at BT's International Network Services."The underlying issue is that many systems are designed to stop honest people from making mistakes, but do not take into account those with malicious intent," Rothke said.It makes insider jobs one of the toughest to defend against. The psychological profile of an insider tends to be a disgruntled employee who feels wronged by the company, according to the Insider Threat Report.That in turn can lead to a suspicious behavior such as staying late at work, which paradoxically might only signal a committed employee."It's always the insider," Rothke said. "It's often harder to steal $10,000 from a bank than $10 million."