Chase discards tapes with data on 2.6M Circuit City customers
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Tapes with data on 2.6 million current and former Circuit City credit card account holders were thrown away by credit card vendor Chase Card Services and buried in a landfill.
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(InfoWorld) - Hard drives full of confidential data are still turning up on the second-hand market, researchers have reported. Investigations carried out on behalf of BT by the University of Glamorgan in the U.K., Edith Cowan University in Australia, and Longwood University in the U.S., found that 37 percent of drives surveyed had traces of personal data on them. Damningly, this figure is much the same as it was for the same surveys undertaken by the universities in each of the last two years, suggesting that either companies are ignoring the issue or simply lack the tools to adequately wipe data before resale. Sensitive information retrieved included salary details, financial data of specific companies, credit card numbers, medical data, visa applications, details of online purchases, and inevitably, online pornography. The sample totalled 350 hard drives acquired in online auctions. "Given the level of exposure that the subjects of security and identity theft has received in recent times, and the availability of suitable tools to ensure the safe disposal of information, it is difficult to understand why disks are still not being effectively cleaned before they are disposed off," said BT's security research head, Dr Andy Jones. "When organizations dispose off surplus and obsolete computers and hard disks, they must ensure that adequate procedures are in place to destroy any data and also to check that the procedures that are in place are effective -- whether they are handled by internal resources or through a third party contractor," he said. The full report -- which has yet to be made publically available -- reveals that buying second-hand disks is an unreliable way to get hold of storage. Of the 133 disks bought in the U.K., 44 percent of them didn't even work. But of those that did, 19 percent had enough information on them to identify the organization from which they had come, 65 percent had enough data to identify named people, and 17 percent contained "illicit" data. Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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By Zinie Chen Sampson Associated Press  RICHMOND, Va. -- Electronics retailer Circuit City Stores Inc.
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I saw an ad in yesterday's NY Times that offered the complete New Yorker magazine archive, including all the cartoons and ads, going back to 1920-something for a bit more than the hard disk would cost. The ad was from J&R, the company that makes the product is Pexagon. $149. Sounds like there might be DRM. I asked for something like this from the music business. A hundred gigs of popular music for $500, all pre-installed on the disk without DRM.  Someone at the New Yorker had this idea too? It's a good one. Bulk content for collector types. Another source of revenue. I want to run my own personal radio station, so having every song of a certain genre or from a certain period makes the diff.
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Consumer electronics retailer Circuit  City Stores Inc.  plans another round of job cuts,  affecting about 850 store managers and headquarters staff, the  Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition on Thursday.
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Circuit City Stores Inc., the nation's No. 2 consumer electronics retailer, said Thursday it plans to close seven domestic Superstores, a Kentucky distribution center and 62 company-owned stores in Canada to cut costs and improve its financial performance.
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Blog: From its Certegy Check Services subsidiary, 2.3 million Fidelity National Information Services consumer financial records are sold to a data broker.
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(InfoWorld) - Â A Massachusetts vendor has addressed the problem of tape data backup in remote offices by removing tape from the enterprise entirely. Privately held Signiant Inc., of Burlington, will unveil its Mobilize for Remote Data Protection product at the Storage Decisions Conference that opens Wednesday in New York City. Mobilize is designed to aggregate data at the remote offices of a large- and medium-size business for transport over wide area networks (WANs) to a datacenter at its headquarters. Signiant is partnering with Sepaton Inc., of Marlborough, Massachusetts, which offers a virtual tape library system for datacenters. Businesses are increasingly concerned about protecting data in their field offices by consolidating it in the central office, said Rich Vining, Signiant's director of marketing. "Companies realize that up to 60 percent of their data is in remote offices and it's mostly on tape. There is a big risk companies see in terms of data loss," Vining said. Most remote offices don't have the information technology staff to effectively manage tape backup systems. "They're mostly sales and marketing people so it's not part of their job," Vining said. A 2005 survey of enterprise IT managers by the research firm Gartner Inc. showed that more than 50 percent of them said they were looking for a better way to protect data at their remote offices, said Dave Russell, a research vice president at Gartner. "I'm getting more and more inquiries from clients about how to protect the remote office," said Russell. Russell is witnessing a trend toward disk drive data backup as opposed to tape back up. "Disk reduces human intervention and the risk of human errors or of tapes going missing," he said. But tape still is a much less expensive solution than disk storage. Signiant faces competition for its new product from companies such as Symantec Corp., of Cupertino, California, which in April introduced its Net Backup Pure Disk for Remote Offices, and Avamar Technologies Inc., of Irvine, California, whose remote office solution compresses the data at the field office to make it easier to transmit over its WAN to the data center. Signiant is introducing Mobilize for companies with from five to 30 remote offices at a starting price of less than US$10,000 per office and a larger system for companies with between 30 and 2,000 remote offices starting at $75,000 per office.
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There are multiple known instances of lost or stolen tapes but, to the best of my knowledge, not one reported instance of anyone recovering and maliciously using data stored on missing tapes. It's just too hard for an average thief to retrieve it.
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Weeks after the government admitted that it had lost computer discs containing the names and bank account details of 25 million people, exposing nearly half the population to possible fraud and identity theft, the U.K. said a contractor has lost personal data on 3 million learner drivers.
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Electronics retailer Circuit City Stores Inc. reported a $54.6 million first-quarter loss Wednesday and withdrew its financial guidance for fiscal 2008 as the company slashed jobs and restructured to fend of competition.
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The personal data of some 237,000 policy holders at Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. -- stored on back-up tapes that were misplaced -- may have been compromised, the company said.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)&#160;has settled a complaint with a Web-based company it accused of selling people&#39;s telephone records without permission, the agency said Monday.The settlement with CEO Group, doing business as Check Em Out, bars the company and its operator Scott Joseph from marketing or selling phone records, and it requires the company to give up $25,000 of its profits from selling phone records. Selling phone records to third parties is illegal under federal law, the FTC had charged.The FTC in May 2006 filed complaints in U.S. court against five Web-based companies that obtained and sold confidential phone records to third parties. In addition to the settlement with CEO Group, the FTC has settled two other cases and obtained a default judgment against a fourth company. The complaint against the fifth company is still active.The FTC&#39;s complaints came after complaints from privacy groups and members of the U.S. Congress about pretexting, when someone obtains a telephone customers&#39; records without permission under false pretexts. In many cases, companies offering phone records over the Internet were calling telephone carriers and pretending to be the targeted customer. In September 2006,&#160;Hewlett-Packard revealed it had been spying on some of its board members and journalists in an attempt to uncover the source of boardroom leaks, and HP officials later said their investigators had used pretexting to obtain phone records.The Telecommunications Act of 1996 prohibits customers&#39; phone records from being disclosed unless &quot;upon affirmative written request by the customer.&quot; The FTC charged the five Web-based companies of engaging in unfair business practices.The settlement with CEO Group prohibits it from obtaining, marketing or selling consumer phone records or other consumer personal information except where allowed by law, the FTC said in a news release. The settlement, approved by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, includes a judgment of $222,381, the amount the company earned by selling phone records, but the defendants said they were able to pay only $25,000. If the court finds that the defendants misrepresented their finances, the entire amount will be due, the FTC said.
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Circuit City Stores Inc.  on Wednesday said it would close 19 superstores, five regional offices and a distribution center by the end of the month, a day after the struggling electronics retailer received a &#36;3.25 billion takeover offer.
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A Las Vegas company has been fined $2.6 million and ordered to stop sending spam, making false claims.
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Record-breaking data leak was 'foreseeable' The leak of 45 million people's credit card information was caused by retailer TJX gathering too much data and not protecting it properly, according to the Canadian privacy commissioner.â¦
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The hackers who stole customer data from TJX Companies Inc. did so over poorly protected wireless networks at two Marshalls stores in Miami, according to a report on the incident by the privacy commissioners of Canada and Alberta