Only some data thieves face two-year prison threat
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Paper files exempt The Government's planned two-year jail sentence for information thieves will not apply to people who steal or trade in personal information from most manual filing systems. Apart from some Government files, the penalties will only apply to electronic databases.â¦
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Court sentences pair of hackers deemed responsible for hijacking millions of PCs to sentences that equal time-served and sent them home on probation.
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It takes effort and intelligence to keep personal information out of the hands of people and governments bent on misusing the data.
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(InfoWorld) - Criminals working with computer hackersÂ pose a rising threat to businesses and governments as those entities increase their dependence on IT systems, a top U.S. federal prosecutor said Thursday. "There's always this worry, and I think a legitimate worry, that terrorists will actually launch computer attacks on critical infrastructure," said Christopher Painter, principal deputy chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. Painter, who prosecuted famed hacker Kevin Mitnick before he signed a plea agreement, cited a case where a hacker in Australia fouled a fresh water supply in 2000 by hacking into a wireless connection and releasing tons of sewage. In the U.S. in 1997, a juvenile hacked into a computer phone and data system and turned off the runway lights at an airport in Worcester, Massachusetts, Painter said. "That obviously could have had pretty dire consequences," Painter said, who spoke about cybercrime at the Information Security Systems Association conference in London. Authorities have seen an increase in cases where hackers steal corporate data and then attempt to blackmail companies, Painter said. Others steal data and sell it to other criminals. In October 2004, the U.S. Secret Service busted the "Shadowcrew," a criminal group that stole credit card data and then sold it on a Web site, Painter said. The problem for law enforcement is that the bad guys are showing increased technical sophistication and often commit cybercrimes across borders, Painter said. But countries are coordinating more on investigations and takedowns, Painter said. Forty-five countries have joined the G8 24/7 High Tech Crime Network, a group of contacts that can offer immediate assistance to other countries on terrorist or criminal cases involving electronic evidence, Painter said. Painter cited a success this week whereÂ Moroccan authorities sentenced two people to prison for the Zotob and Mytob worms, which downed computers worldwide in August 2005. The U.S., Turkey, Morocco and Microsoft Corp. aided in that investigation, he said. But a difficulty with international investigations are countries with weak or no laws against computer crime, Painter said. "Any country that doesn't have good laws is going to be a weak link," he said. Â
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(InfoWorld) - A Seattle man faces as many as 29 years in prison after being charged with using the LimeWire and Soulseek p-to-p (peer-to-peer) networks to commit identity theft. Gregory Kopiloff was arrested Thursday on charges of mail fraud, accessing a protected computer without authorization, and two counts of aggravated identity theft, said Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington. This is the first case that Langlie's office is aware of that involves p-to-p identity-theft charges, she said. In court filings, federal prosecutors alleged that Kopiloff began the scam around March 2005, using the p-to-p networks to search for victims who had accidentally configured their software to share sensitive documents. Hard drives were searched for "federal income tax returns, student financial aid applications, and credit reports that had been stored electronically," court filings state. Using that information, Kopiloff would fill out online credit card applications, then buy products such as iPods or computer hard drives, which he then resold for cash, typically at about 50 cents on the dollar, federal prosecutors claim. Kopiloff was allegedly able to buy more than $73,000 worth of merchandise using online credit card accounts he'd set up using the identities of at least 83 victims. It's easy for unsophisticated users to accidentally share sensitive information via p-to-p networks, said Christopher Boyd, director of malware research with FaceTime Communications. "Some P2P programs have 'share folder' options and if you accidentally hit it, bam -- it's out there without you even knowing about it," he said in an instant-message interview. But luckily there's an easy fix for the problem. Boyd recommends that p-to-p users place all of their sensitive documents on a stand-alone drive, separate from the main PC. "It's about the best way to ensure you don't accidentally share your life story with the rest of the world via P2P," he said.
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E-Mail sob stories that turn out to be scams could bring jail terms for trio who coaxed $1.2 million from victims.
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Users are finding lots of inventive ways to lose precious files, say data recovery experts.
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Researchers report that 37 percent of old hard drives still contain personal data from former owners.
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The drives from LaCie, use biometrics to restrict access to data and will not work if they've been removed from the case and are plugged into another machine.
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Malware, carelessness, data leaks--whether internal or external threats, there's too many to count.
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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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Faces as many as 29 years in prison after being charged with using peer-to-peer networks to commit identity theft.
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A report released Thursday by the GAO indicates that just one-sixth of the 24 largest data breaches reported between January 2000 and June 2005 resulted in actual identity theft. The report could give support to those who want breach-notification rules eased.
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If you&#39;re a convicted identity thief, you&#39;ve got about a 50 percent chance of avoiding jail time.That&#39;s one of the findings of a new study of closed U.S. Secret Service case files, released Monday by Utica College&#39;s Center for Identity Management and Information Protection. This is the first time researchers have been allowed to sift through the Secret Service&#39;s data. The study&#39;s authors based their findings on an&#160;analysis of 500 closed Secret Service cases.&quot;Prosecutors had a slightly better chance of sending a convicted identity thief to prison than not (51 percent) and could expect to see the imprisoned offender sentenced to three years or less of incarceration,&quot; the report said.The college has been working with a number of partners, including the Secret Service, IBM, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, since the Center&#39;s creation in mid-2006 to study the methods used by ID thieves and to help corporations and law enforcement prevent this type of crime.Technology like printers, mobile phones, and computers were used in about half of the cases, but the Internet was the exclusive tool of ID thieves only about 10 percent of the time.Identity theft is concentrated in the northeastern and southern United States, the study found. And the majority of the offenders in the Secret Service cases were African-American; more than two-thirds of all offenders were male.The study also found that ID thieves tended to hit people that they did not know, rather than preying on friends and relatives. A family member or friend was the victim in 16 percent of cases. In about a third of the cases, the theft was an inside job, with the data being stolen from an employer.Identity theft is a well-studied phenomenon, but it&#39;s unusual for a survey to be based on this kind of closed-case data. &quot;This study is significant because it did not depend on self-reported or survey data,&quot; the authors wrote.The median loss from identity theft was just over $31,000, but in one case, investigated by the Secret Service&#39;s Dallas field office, the defendant spent millions on luxury vehicles and then managed to set up shell companies and defraud investors. Total losses: $13 million. &quot;In general,&quot; however, &quot;the more offenders involved in the case, the higher the victim loss,&quot; the study stated.According to Javelin Strategy &amp; Research, identity theft cost U.S.businesses and consumers an estimated $49.3 billion in 2006.&#160;
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It only takes 20 minutes on the Internet for an unprotected computer running Microsoft Windows to be taken over by a hacker. Any personal or financial information stored
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By Jim Provance, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio  Jun. 16--COLUMBUS -- A thief made away with a state government computer backup "storage device" containing the names and COLUMBUS numbers of more than 64,000 state employees, prompting Gov. Ted Strickland to issue an alert yesterday.
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A senior U.S. army officer in Iraq was sentenced to two years in prison on Friday after a court martial found him guilty of illegally possessing thousands of secret military documents.