230 retailers affected by data breach after tape lost
679026
A backup tape containing credit-card information from hundreds of U.S. retailers is missing, forcing the company responsible for the data to warn customers that they may become the targets of data fraud.GE Money, which manages in-store credit-card programs for the majority of U.S. retailers, first realized that the tape was missing from an Iron Mountain secure storage facility in October, said Richard Jones, a company spokesman. &quot;We were informed that one of the tapes could not be located. But at the same time, there was no record of it ever having been checked out,&quot; he said.The tape contained in-store credit-card information on 650,000 retail customers, including those of J.C. Penney, he said. GE Money employees are also affected by the breach.The missing backup tape was unencrypted.Although J.C. Penney was the only company that Jones would confirm as affected by the missing tape, that retailer accounts for just a small percentage of all accounts that were compromised. In total, 230 retailers are affected by the breach. &quot;Clearly that number includes many of the national retail organizations,&quot; he said.The tape also contained Social Security numbers of 150,000 customers. When matched with name and address information, Social Security numbers can be used to set up fraudulent credit-card accounts, a common form of identity theft.Jones said that following a GE Money investigation, there is no evidence that the tape in question has been stolen or that the data it contained was misused.After reconstructing the data that was on the missing tape, GE Money began sending out letters to those affected by the breach in December. The company has set up a toll-free number and is offering one year of free credit monitoring services to those affected by the breach.In 2006, retailer TJ Maxx discovered that thieves had&#160;broken into its computer networks, stealing an estimated 94 million credit- and debit-card numbers. Costs related to that breach are expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.GE Money is a division of General Electric.
172460
TJX has revealed that a breach of its credit card transaction systems occurred a year earlier than previously disclosed and that many more customers may have been affected.
503
Financial institution failed to operate effective security measures to protect customers from data theft, government watchdog agency says.
470278
'Little chance for success' Victims of Government data loss are being encouraged to buy packs claiming to help them claim compensation. Thousands have paid out, but privacy lawyers have warned that success is very unlikely.â¦
604602
The Department of Veterans Affairs has disclosed that information on more than half a million individuals and about 1.3 million non-VA physicians, both living and dead, is missing or might have been stolen. The information was stored on a portable hard drive that was being used by a VA employee at the department's facility in Birmingham, Ala.
428558
The TJX Companies, Inc., a discount retailer, said Friday it settled class action lawsuits in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico stemming from a massive security breach of customer data that affected at least 45 million credit and debit cards.
520196
Citing the high-tech theft of credit card numbers from Stop &amp; Shop Supermarket Cos., Massachusetts bankers yesterday urged state legislators to force retailers and others who fail to keep card data protected to pay all costs for fixing security breaches.
759780
And the breach goes on: Saturday's big security breach at anti-piracy firm MediaDefender isn't the only one. At least two others have surfaced, including an apparently leaked phone conversation about an earlier security problem.
443975
Sensitive customer details are lost in an Atlanta burglary - the third such theft in a year. For the third time in a year, criminals have stolen computers that contained names and sensitive financial information of customers of Wells Fargo &amp; Co.
387016
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.
657408
(Source: Arsenal Digital)  Hackers, disgruntled and careless employees, equipment failure, broken pipes, fires, and natural disasters all pose threats to your data. Savvy IT and business managers have recognized that in order to deal with these challenges, they need to deploy a company-wide data protection infrastructure. Unfortunately, traditional data protection strategies that rely on tape backup are often too expensive and too difficult to manage in today's business environment where an increasing amount of data resides in branch offices and on employees' PCs and laptops. To help IT managers conquer their biggest data protection challenges, Arsenal Digital has released "Solving the Distributed Data Problem: The Rise of Remote Data Protection Services." This report discusses: - The changing corporate environment where more and more business-critical information is generated and stored outside of headquarters - The growing need to protect data for compliance, customer assurance, and business continuity reasons - The advantages of using an on-demand, distributed data protection service that automatically, reliably, and securely backs up off-site PCs and servers.
116323
Blog: Past and current employees are affected by a third-party tape loss.
380529
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;
296877
A security breach at AT&T has exposed personal information on over 19,000 people who shopped at the company's online store, the company confirmed Tuesday. The leaked data included credit card numbers.
211942
AT&T said that its online store has been hacked and that the credit card information and personal data of as many as 19,000 customers may have been compromised.
184114
Retailers attending the ERIexchange conference in Boston complained that security standards imposed by credit card companies are costly to implement and leave them with an unfair burden in securing credit card data.
337989
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.