ChoicePoint Settles Data Security Case
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ChoicePoint has settled with 44 states over a data breach that potentially gave criminals access to personal information from more than 145,000 consumers.
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By Therese Poletti; Ryan Blitstein  Hewlett-Packard agreed today to pay $14.5 million to settle civil claims brought by the California attorney general's office, also today, arising from the company's board-spying scandal.
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Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo have agreed to pay a total of $31.5 million to resolve claims that they promoted illegal gambling, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday.
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The U.K. National Health Service and Electronic Data Systems reached a settlement after the NHS terminated a contract for the company to supply a secure e-mail and directory system.
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(InfoWorld) - More than two years after a security researcher first called attention to Sony BMG's use of a stealth program to enforce digital rights management on its music CDs, the company reached a deal with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over the incident, the FTC announced on Tuesday. In a deal that was approved by a 5-0 vote by the FTC, Sony agreed to clearly disclose limitations on consumers' use of its music CDs and promised not to collect information for marketing or install software without consumers consent, the FTC said. The company also agreed to reimburse consumers up to $150 for computers damaged by the program, the FTC said. The settlement marks an end to a long and embarrassing incident for the company, which began when Mark Russinovich, an expert on Windows security of WinTernals Software, now part of Microsoft, published the results of his investigation into a rootkit that had infiltrated his Windows machine. Russinovich's research uncovered a stealth program, dubbed "XCP," distributed on CDs from Sony BMG that silently installed and concealed itself on the machines of customers who played the CD. The revelation and Sony's awkward response to it -- first denying that there was any problem with the XCP program, then making halting efforts to release programs to remove XCP -- set of a chorus of criticism on blogs and in the mainstream press. Subsequent investigation revealed that the XCP program was poorly conceived, hastily written and could be used by hackers to conceal their own malicious programs on systems that had the XCP program installed. Eventually, Sony posted a software removal program for the XCP and conducted a widescale recall of XCP enabled CDs. But the incident was a watershed, prompting discussions of the competing interests of copy protection by corporations and consumers' right to privacy. In the consent agreement announced today, the FTC said that "the installation of software without consumer consent that exposed consumers' computers to security risks was unfair and violated federal law." Hiding the software and failing to provide a way to remove it were also violations of U.S. law, the FTC said. The company will have to offer its removal program for another two years and will have to continue allowing customers to exchange CDs with the concealed software purchased before December 31, 2006. The company will also have to provide retailers with financial inducements to return XCP infected CDs and allow the FTC to continue to monitor its compliance with the consent decree.
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Qwest Communications agrees to make a  $250m payment to settle charges stemming from an inquiry into an alleged securities fraud.
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(InfoWorld) - An operation that allegedly installed illegal spyware on computers will give more than US$2 million to settle a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint. The FTC has obtained a settlement order against Enternet Media Inc., Conspy & Co. Inc., Lida Rohbani, Nima Hakimi and Baback Hakimi, all based in California, the agency announced Wednesday. The defendants distributed software called Search Miracle, Miracle Search, EM Toolbar, EliteBar and Elite Toolbar, the FTC said. In an order issued by Judge Christine Snyder of the U.S District Court for Central California, the defendants are prohibited from interfering with computer use, such as distributing software code that tracks Internet activity, changes browser settings and inserts new advertising toolbars onto browsers. The defendants also are permanently prohibited from making misleading representations regarding the performance, features, and cost, of any software, including misrepresenting that the code is an Internet browser upgrade or other computer security software, music, song, lyric or cell phone ring tone. The Web sites of the defendants and their affiliates caused installation boxes to pop up on consumersâ computer screens, the FTC said in its complaint. In one variation of the scheme, the boxes offered a variety of freeware, including music files, cell phone ring tones, photographs, wallpaper and song lyrics. In another, the boxes warned that consumersâ Internet browsers were defective, and offered free browser upgrades or security patches. Users who downloaded the supposed freeware or security upgrades did not receive what they were promised, Instead, their computers were infected with spyware that interfered with their computers and was difficult to uninstall, the FTC said. The defendants' software tracked Internet activity, changed home-page settings and inserted a large frame onto browser windows that displayed advertisements, the FTC said. At the FTCâs request, the court froze the operationâs assets last fall and ordered it shut down. The settlement requires the defendants to give up just over $2 million of their spyware-related profits and includes a suspended judgment of $8.5 million. The FTC brought the case with assistance from Microsoft Corp., Webroot Software Inc. and Google Inc., the agency said.
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Following Microsoft's lead, software maker opts to issue fixes on a monthly timetable. But does that make customers more secure?
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Remote-management vendor Raritan Computer Inc has announced an agreement with help-desk and asset-management developer Numara Software Inc for a joint incident-resolution offering.
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Things just aren&#39;t going well for Timothy Scott Short. Just days after a pair of tech support calls he made to printer manufacturer Digimarc&#160;resulted in his arrest, he now finds himself on the receiving end of a data breach with his Social Security number and birthdate accidentally made public via the federal court&#39;s Electronic Case Files (ECF) system.It&#39;s an ironic development, because Short, 33, was arrested in connection with the Oct. 5 theft of a Missouri Department of Revenue printer and a PC containing data on as many as 500 state residents.Short&#39;s personal information was discovered by the IDG News Service, listed on a court document called a Criminal Case Cover Sheet, which was publicly available to users of the ECF system. Normally, this document should only be accessible to those involved in the case, but it appears to have been inadvertently made public, according to a clerk with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak with the press. &quot;It&#39;s something on our side,&quot; she said, adding that technical staff is now looking into the problem.The U.S. Judicial Conference, which sets policy for U.S. courts, has said that this kind of information should be removed from publicly available electronic court records, but actually removing all the sensitive information has proved difficult.&quot;If you went online to various court systems, you could find social security numbers of many individuals,&quot; said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. &quot;It&#39;s a really, really difficult question to answer, just because you&#39;re dealing with so many jurisdictions.&quot;Social Security numbers are the building blocks of identity theft crime because they can be used to secure credit cards. &quot;Any time you are placing Social Security numbers online, your are subjecting that person to identity theft,&quot; Stephens said.With the push to make public documents available online, other government databases have had similar problems. Earlier this year, the states of California and Colorado were forced to take their Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) databases offline after privacy advocates pointed out that the Social Security numbers and other data they contained could be misused by identity thieves.Short, however, may have bigger problems to worry about. He&#39;s facing $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison on charges of possession of &quot;document-making implements&quot; in connection with the theft. He was arrested after U.S. Secret Service Special Agent John Bush recognized his voice in calls placed to a tech support line of the company that makes the stolen printer.&#160;
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Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have agreed to pay a combined $31.5 million to settle federal civil allegations they took ads for illegal gambling.
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Microsoft said Thursday that it had settled an eight-year patent dispute relating to a feature that allows embedded links in its browser that resulted in a $521 million jury verdict against it.
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(InfoWorld) - Washington's attorney general has settled the first case prosecuted under the state's 2005 Computer Spyware Act. The settlement. announced Monday, is with antispyware vendor Secure Computer LLC. The White Plains, New York, software companyÂ was accused of marketing its product via deceptive spam and pop-up ads, which offered free spyware scans that always detected a problem with the computer that was scanned. The company and its president, Paul Burke, will pay $725,000 in legal fees and $200,000 in penalties, and will reimburse Washington state customers $75,000, said Paula Selis, senior council with the attorney general's office. "Given the scope of the defendants' practices and the amount of consumer harm out there, we feel this is a very fair settlement." More than 1,100 state residents purchased the company's Spyware Cleaner software since it went on the market in 2004, Selis said. Those customers will now be e-mailed by Secure Computer and offered a refund for the $49.95 product, under terms of the settlement. Secure Computer, which admits no wrongdoing in the matter, is also prohibited from usingÂ deceptive marketing techniquesÂ to promote its software, and the company must now review the advertising of its marketing affiliates to make sure they comply with the settlement. That seems like an unlikely possibility, however, because Spyware Cleaner was pulled from the market shortly after the lawsuits were filed in late January, and Secure Computer LLC is now out of business, according to the company's Web site. Representatives from Secure Computer could not be reached for comment. Secure Computer and four of its business partners were sued by Microsoft and the Washington attorney general in January, but charges against three of the men have already been settled. A fourth man, Manoj Kumar of Maharashtra, India, could not be located, the attorney general's office said. Â
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Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have agreed to pay a total of US$31.5 million to resolve claims that they promoted illegal gambling, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday.
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Security beyond the firewall Check Point has made a bid to acquire Protect Data, the holding company for mobile security firm PointSec Mobile Technologies, in a cash deal valued at $586m (SEK 4,152m).â¦
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By Therese Poletti, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  SJ-0523-Hewlett-Packard-settles-with-SEC   Hewlett-Packard settles with SEC   Therese Poletti  San Jose  Mercury News, Calif.
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The companies settle a lawsuit in which the software giant was accused of poaching smart-phone trade secrets.