Gun Owners Become Target for ID Thieves: A Company Doing Work for Berks County Apparently Leaves the Personal Information of County Gunpermit Holders -- Including Their Social Security Numbers -- Exposed on the Internet.
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By Dan Kelly, Reading Eagle, Pa.  Sep. 8--At least two people, including an Internet user in China, accessed a supposedly confidential list of some of Berks County's 25,000 gun-permit holders, Sheriff Barry J. Jozwiak confirmed Thursday.
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By Tammy Krikorian, The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz.  Sep. 10--The Internet gives East Valley parents plenty to worry about. Teens go online to socialize with friends and strangers, post personal photographs and even pour out their deepest secrets.
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By Paul Wenske, The Kansas City Star, Mo. Jun. 8--If you're like lots of Americans, you're increasingly wary of identity theft.
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The loss or theft of personal data such as credit card and Social Security numbers is soaring to unprecedented levels, and the trend isn't expected to turn around anytime soon as hackers stay a step ahead of security and laptops disappear with sensitive information.
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The theft of a laptop containing Social Security numbers of Nashville, Tenn.-area voters is expected to cost local officials about $1 million as they roll out identity-theft protection to those affected.County officials say that thieves broke into Davidson County Election Commission offices on the weekend before Christmas, smashing a window with a rock and then making off with a $3,000 router, a digital camera, and a pair of Dell Latitude laptops containing names and Social Security numbers of all 337,000 registered voters in the county.County election officials began notifying residents of the breach on Jan. 2, and the local government is offering victims one year of free identity theft protection from Debix Identity Protection Network.Debix says that 25 to 35 percent of victims of this type of breach typically request this service. With the city paying Debix just under $10 per account, the price tag for the laptop theft is expected to be in the $1 million range.Since state data breach disclosure laws went into effect a few years ago, the theft of an unencrypted laptop computer can become a major problem for any organization that stores sensitive data.&quot;It is a very bad information-handling practice to keep sensitive information about individuals including their Social Security numbers on an unencrypted laptop or any other device that is removable,&quot; said Paul Stephens director of policy and advocacy with Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a privacy advocacy group that has tracked the exposure of 217 million records in the United States over the past three years.Laptop thefts have been the source of privacy breaches at AT&amp;T,&#160;The Gap, and the Chicago Public School system recently.The Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County&#39;s IT services department is now working with the Commission to make changes to protect residents from this type of incident and has already come up with 19 recommendations, said Janel Lacy, a spokeswoman for Nashville Mayor Karl Dean.
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Lawmakers may soon pass a bill that would set up a huge network of databases that law enforcement officials could tap to find terrorists. But that kind of unfettered access to data about Americans raises eyebrows. By Ryan Singel.
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A customer filed a $54 million lawsuit against Best Buy for losing an $1100 laptop she took in for service. The reason, exposure to identity theft.  It's about time vendors were forced to recognize the value of customers' data. I recall how the chief genius at the Apple store in Emeryville complained that they would have to eat the cost of the drive in a deal they made with the manufacturer. Someday they'll have a clue that the data on most drives is worth far more than the hardware, and that their potential liability, if the data ends up in the hands of an identity thief, is also much greater.
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Opinion: Whether they realize it or not, many people leave sensitive information out in plain view on Web sites. But sooner or later, a Google search will dig it up.
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Plans are under way for a scheme aimed at encouraging people to inform on others who have a gun illegally.
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Some members discover itâs tough to erase all their information from the site.
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(InfoWorld) - Troy Aikman may not be happy about it, but the State of Texas has made his address and social security number available via the Internet. Sensitive information on Aikman, formerly a star quarterback with the Dallas Cowboys, and thousands of others is available on the Texas Secretary of State's SOSDirect Web site, according to Steven Peisner, the president of fraud prevention vendor Sellitsafe, who has provided IDG News Service with a half-dozen examples of social security numbers he was able to obtain from the site. As government pushes more and more documents online, Texas is one of many state and local governments across the U.S. that is now struggling to remove sensitive information so that it cannot be misused by criminals. Peisner found social security numbers on tax liens and on loan agreement notifications filed with the state, called Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) financing statements. Texas has been automatically removing sensitive information from all documents filed with SOSDirect since June 2005, and the state is now in the process of redacting this information from earlier filings, said Scott Haywood, a spokesman with the Office of the Texas Secretary of State. But residents whose social security numbers are posted on SOSDirect need to contact the Secretary of State's office directly in order to have them removed right away, he added. That's not good enough for Peisner. "It's pretty cheap to do that... to make someone send in a request," he said. "There are literally hundreds of thousands of documents where social security numbers [are exposed]." He thought that Texas should follow the lead of states like California andÂ Colorado, which shut down access to their UCC databases earlier this year when privacy advocates notified them that they could be misused by identity thieves. Users must submit a credit card number in order to search the Texas database, but Peisner said that lax security makes that barrier meaningless to most hackers. He said he was able to get access to information using a fake name and without providing the three-digit security code listed on the back of most cards. He believes that criminals could obtain information from the site using phony credit card numbers. Peisner said he spoke with staffers at the Texas Secretary of State's office of his concerns last week, but to no avail. "You would think if somebody called up and said that this Web site has a hole so big that you could drive the Spruce Goose through it, that they would take it down." One privacy advocate agreed with Peisner. A name and social security number is all that criminals need to set up a phony credit card application, said Beth Givens, director of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. "They need to immediately take action and take that Web site offline and in some other way remove or redact [the information]," she said. But according to Haywood, the Texas Secretary of State is required to make the documents available under state public information laws. "Obviously our office is committed to trying to protect personal information in accordance with the law," he said. "But we also have a responsibility to post public information that has been submitted to our office. So we're balancing those responsibilities." Ironically, Texas has recently gone after pawn shops and check-cashing operations in the state for throwing out sensitive data in public dumpsters. The state should take a good look at its own data retention practices, Peisner said. "It's extremely hypocritical. They're talking about information that might not have been properly destroyed or shredded that was in a garbage bag... when there are thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of citizens whose information is easily available on the Web, where you don't have to go into a garbage dump and get your hands dirty." Â
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State officials say it&#39;s not clear if names and Social Security numbers were accessed or stolen but urge individuals to take precautions against identity theft.
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By Chris Parker, The Morning Call, Allentown, Pa.  May 24--Schuylkill County's district attorney will determine whether charges should be filed because the Republican controller candidate took over Internet domain names referring to his Democratic opponent.
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There are thousands of dollars just waiting to be claimed, and NBC 10 has the list. Monday, the IRS released a list of a couple thousand names of people from the Philadelphia area -- including South Jersey and Delaware -- who have checks coming to them.
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QUESTION: What is the best approach to protecting me from ID theft and related activities? Will a software package work best, or must I go to a hardware firewall?
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Tycho:  I understand he's posting these around his neighborhood, now, and I mean real Gabe, not the jpeg Gabe like you might see sur le web. If you did find it, I wouldn't bring it back to him. The most likely scenario is that he will assume that you're the one who stole it, and your "reward" will be a savage karate style maneuver delivered to your "sack of toys."
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Prince William County is moving to enact what legal specialists say are some of the toughest measures in the nation targeting illegal immigrants, including a provision that would direct police to check the residency status of anyone detained for breaking the law -- whether shoplifting, speeding or...