Credit protection due vets in data theft
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Millions of veterans and active-duty troops whose sensitive personal information was lost by the Veterans Affairs Department will receive some form of credit protection against identity theft, the government said Wednesday.
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Business & money: Specialist teams to tackle illegal lending.
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A portable hard drive that may contain the personal information of up to 48,000 veterans may have been stolen, the Department of Veterans Affairs and a lawmaker said Friday.
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Personal information about 6,000 current and former University of Virginia faculty members may have been stolen by hackers.
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(InfoWorld) - Authorities have charged a 21 year-old Unisys Corp. subcontractor with stealing a desktop computer with billing information on as many as 38,000 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs medical patients. Khalil Abdulla-Raheem, of Washington, D.C., was charged Wednesday with theft of government property. He is the employee of an unnamed company that "provides temporary labor to Unisys," according to a statement released by the Veterans Affairs (VA) department's Office of Inspector General. The computer wasÂ stolen in late July from Unisys's Reston, Virginia, offices. It contained records on about 16,000 living patients who had received treatment at VA medical centers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, as well as information on another 2,000 who are deceased. Data on an additional 20,000 patients may have been stored on the computer, according to the VA. The VA said that these records may have contained Social Security numbers, addresses, and insurance information. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is now analyzing the computer to determine whether this information has been compromised, but investigators do not believe that Abdulla-Raheem was after the VA data. This is the second ofÂ two major data breaches at the VA this year. In May, personal information on about 26.5 million veterans was compromised when a laptop and external hard drive were stolen from a VA analyst's home. Authorities haveÂ arrested two teenagers in connection with that theft and the FBI has concluded that the sensitive information was untouched. Still, the data in question was unencrypted in both of these incidents, and the VA, which has regularly scored failing grades in the Federal Government's annual computer security scorecard, has been blasted for its handling of the matter. The department's Inspector General published a report in July citingÂ policy failures and a lack of supervision in the May incident, and called for the VA to adopt a clear policy for safeguarding sensitive data. With data notification laws pushing data breaches into the public eye, PC encryption has become a priority for many IT departments. In fact, laptop encryption will top a list of the ten most important security trends for 2007, due to be released on October 1 by the SANS Institute, a computer security training organization. "Every major organization is moving forward to buy and deploy encryption products," said SANS Director of Research Alan Paller, in an e-mail note sent Thursday. "The reason is that top management is adamant about not facing personal embarrassment because of lost sensitive data." Abdulla-Raheem was released on bail Wednesday and is due back in federal court for a preliminary hearing on October 3. Unisys has offered a US$50,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the PC. So far, nobody has come forward to claim the money, according to Lisa Meyer, a Unisys spokeswoman. Unisys had not encrypted the data on the stolen PC because this was not required by the VA, but the company is now taking a second look at this policy, Meyer said. "An event like this causes us to reexamine everything we're doing," she said. Â
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Tens of thousands of U.S. consumers  face a greater risk of identity theft after criminals gained  access to a database of personal records compiled by  ChoicePoint Inc., a company spokesman said on Tuesday.
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Anyone with a "permissible purpose" can peruse your credit history.
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What you'll be held responsible for if your credit card is lost or stolen.
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Some of the nation's most influential former military and intelligence officials are at risk of identity theft after a break-in at a major government contractor netted computers containing personal information about tens of thousands of employees.-The Washington Post
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Reports of corporate data leaks, lost laptops, and misplaced backup tapes are so commonplace that many no longer warrant a mention in the press. So common are corporate data leaks of one form or another that only the multimegaton events -- TJX, the Veterans Administration, or DuPont -- get covered.
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Most large data breaches don't appear to lead to identity theft, and proposals that would require companies to notify customers of most breaches may lead to increased costs.
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(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."
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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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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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Consumers whose personal data may have been compromised will be offered three years of credit-monitoring services and other perks by TJX.
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The Veterans Affairs worker faulted for losing veterans&#039; personal information had permission to access millions of Social Security numbers on a laptop from home, agency documents obtained by The Associated Press show.
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LOS ANGELES (CBS.MW) -- Consumers are doing a better job of guarding against identity thieves, yet most still give out too many personal details, making themselves vulnerable to becoming one of the millions of victims each year, according to a survey