Best Buy issues security warning on Insignia digital picture frames
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Retailer tells customers who purchased an Insignia 10.4-inch Digital Picture Frame to beware of a virus that has infected the device.
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The top US computer security watchdog issues a warning about a flaw in Apple's OS X software.
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A Washington, D.C., woman has filed a lawsuit seeking $54 million in damages from Best Buy after the electronics retailer lost her laptop computer last year.The lawsuit was filed in D.C. superior court last November but was publicized in media outlets this week. According to plaintiff Raelyn Campbell, Geek Squad technicians at Best Buy&#39;s Tenleytown, D.C., store lost the computer sometime around July 2007, then the company misled her about its whereabouts for a few weeks before finally admitting on Aug. 9 that it had been lost.Best Buy offered Campbell $1,110 and a $500 gift card in compensation, something she calls a &quot;lowball&quot; offer on a blog she has devoted to the issue.According to her, the point of the lawsuit is to publicly embarrass Best Buy into changing its privacy policy in such cases.&quot;To me, the big issue is not the low-balling and bullying tactics, but Best Buy&#39;s systematic disregard for its customers&#39; personal information and potential exposure to identity theft,&quot; she wrote in her blog. &quot;I am hoping the attention that the lawsuit and this website generate might motivate Best Buy and other consumer electronics stores entrusted with products that contain consumers&#39; personal information to adopt thorough procedures and policies to safeguard customers&#39; property and personal information against theft.&quot;Best Buy can&#39;t say much about the issue because it&#39;s still before the court, but the company is working to find out what went wrong, according to company spokeswoman Nissa French.&quot;We&#39;re obviously embarrassed and disappointed that we were unable to resolve this customer&#39;s issue. We&#39;ve tried to resolve this dispute and feel badly that it escalated to a lawsuit,&quot; she said in an e-mail.Campbell could not be reached for comment.On her blog, she admitted that the $54 million in damages she was seeking was an &quot;absurd amount,&quot; but said that she chose such a large sum in order to draw attention to the problem.Laptop thefts are frequently the source of widely publicized data breaches. On Wednesday, Lifeblood, a Memphis, Tennessee, blood collection agency, said it was notifying 320,000 blood donors after two of its laptops went missing. The computers contained personal information including Social Security numbers.The issue of computer retailers and repair shops losing consumer laptops has not gained much attention, but Campbell believes these companies have a &quot;legal and moral obligation&quot; to safeguard confidential information on computers that are entrusted to them.Although Campbell&#39;s situation is an unusual one, it makes sense for Best Buy to take extra steps to protect its customers&#39; privacy by offering ID theft protection services, said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a privacy advocacy group that tracks data breaches. &quot;We&#39;re talking about a loss of something that&#39;s been entrusted to them,&quot; he said. &quot;As a bare minimum, they should be doing that.&quot;
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Security experts warned on Wednesday that &quot;exploit code&quot; has been released for the critical flaw discovered in the way Windows and other Microsoft products handle JPEG images (see our previous coverage).
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U.S. consumer-electronics giant Best Buy Inc. has a secret Web site that can block customers from getting the lowest prices, a published report said Friday.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft said it moved quickly to remove a banner advertisement that appeared on its instant-messaging program for a software application that falsely hypes security threats on a user's computer. "We immediately investigated the reports and removed the offending ads, as this is a violation of our ad-serving policy," wrote Microsoft spokeswoman Whitney Burk, in an e-mail Tuesday. Last week, computer security analysts noticed twoÂ advertisements for WinfixerÂ -- a self-described security program that also goes by the name ErrorSafe -- on Windows Live Messenger. Security companies have labeled it as a "potentially unwanted program." They believe the program falsely alerts users to problems with their computer and encourages them to purchase the application. It falls into an informally named category of program called "scareware," whose creators try to bully users into downloading their program or face problems with their computer. Microsoft, which called Winfixer "malware," did not detail how the ads appeared. However, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a civil liberties and consumer group in Washington, D.C., has investigated how questionable ads promoting spyware and other malicious software have appeared on ad networks. The incident highlights how even a well-resourced company such as Microsoft can be vulnerable to the vagaries of complex associations of Internet advertising networks. "There are often a host of parties involved in the advertising chain, making it difficult to track the journey an advertisement takes from its original source to a user's computer," according to a CDT report released last year. It's extremely hard to police advertisements, as the organizations which supply them could suddenly substitute new ones, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, a security software company. "There remains a risk that advertisements may be vetted and approved when first placed with an advertising network only to be later 'updated' to advertise less savory products," Cluley said. "This isn't just a problem for Microsoft, it's a problem for any company which is delivering advertisements to its userbase." The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has undertaken several actions against companies that have created special programs designed to exploit security vulnerabilities in computers, that -- like Winfixer -- purport to repair the machine. The Winfixer incident sparks concerns over end-user security and could be especially important for Microsoft. The company seeks to use advertising to subsidize the cost for free services such as Windows Live Mail, formerly Hotmail, and other Web-based services it's using to compete with online offerings from Google Inc. "For years I have been holding up MSN Messenger banner advertisements as an example of how advertisements can be safely served up to end users without putting them at risk of malware," wrote Sandi Hardmeier, a Microsoft Most Valued Professional and specialist in Internet Explorer, on her blog. "Now, everything has changed. This simply shouldn't have happened." Winfixer, which sells for around $39.95, has a shady history, experts says. It's a persistent program, constantly popping up on newly-created domains under various aliases, including ErrorSafe, WinAntiVirus and DriveCleaner, said Chris Boyd, security research manager for FaceTime Communications Inc. The changing names and versions are hard to keep up with for security analysts, let alone for ad network managers who may have no idea of the true nature of the program, Boyd said. "The suspicions are that it [Winfixer] is a quite sophisticated operation," Boyd said. At one time, Winfixer was one of several bad programs installed in a bundle by hackers on vulnerable machines, wrote Ben Edelman, a malware researcher and doctoral candidate at Harvard University, on his Web site. The hackers exploited the Windows Metafile (WMF) problem, a particularly dangerous security hole that appeared in December 2005 and prompted Microsoft to hurriedly issue an off-schedule patch. As always, users should be careful. "The responsibility ultimately falls on the users to be wary of advertisements which may be selling inappropriate or potentially damaging -- to data or finances -- goods," Cluley said. Â
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Despite displaying a security vendor's "Hacker Safe" logo on its Web site, online technology retailer Geeks.com is warning an unspecified number of customers about a possible data compromise.
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Latest variant poses a risk to home and small office users.
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Computer users could be open to attack from malicious hackers because of the way that Windows displays some images. Microsoft has issued a warning about a critical vulnerability in Windows that could let carefully
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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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A hacker has released attack code that could be used to exploit a critical bug in some versions of the Windows operating system.Microsoft patched the flaw, which affects older versions of Windows, on Oct. 9. When the Image Viewer tries to open a maliciously encoded TIFF file, it can be tricked into running unauthorized software on the PC.A sample of the exploit was posted Monday to the Milw0rm Web site. The code has not yet been used in online attacks, according to Symantec, which issued an alert Monday.Symantec recommends that Windows users install the MS07-055 update as quickly as possible.Microsoft took the unusual step of issuing its own security update for Kodak&#39;s software, because the image viewer (formerly known as the Wang Image Viewer) had shipped in Windows 2000 systems by default.Still, many Windows users are not affected by the problem. Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 users should not have the software installed on their PCs, unless they downloaded it directly or upgraded from Windows 2000. Windows Vista users are not affected by the bug.Also, users would have to open the TIFF file using the Kodak Image Viewer for the attack to work. Because most PCs are set to automatically open TIFFs using some other piece of software, it is unlikely that an attack would succeed.&quot;Its not a huge deal, though, we don&#39;t think,&quot; said Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer with eEye Digital Security, via instant message. &quot;You probably have some other program that defaults to open TIFFs like QuickTime or Photoshop.&quot;The sample attack code affects the Korean language version of Windows, but it could be easily modified to affect other versions of the software, Maiffret said.
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See you in court Best Buy is to "vigorously defend" a lawsuit filed lby the state of Connecticut, accusing the US company bait and switch tactics to deceive and overcharge customers.â¦
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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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Competitors say they should be able replace a Windows feature that tells people about the security status of their PC.
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Online technology retailer Geeks.com displays a security vendor's "Hacker Safe" logo on its Web site. But now it's warning customers of a possible data compromise.
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Connecticut's attorney general announced a lawsuit Thursday against Best Buy Co. Inc., accusing the nation's largest consumer electronics retailer of deceiving customers with in-store computer kiosks and overcharging them.
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Best Buy Inc.'s chief executive said Tuesday that he is "very nervous" about being able to supply customers with the millions of digital TV converter boxes needed ahead of the shutdown of most analog TV transmissions in 13 months.