Macrocosmic Technologies

It looks like Norm Coleman may have a new challenge: Violating state laws related to breach notifications. Politico is reporting that his web site exposed credit card details, and he hasn’t notified folks that their financial information was exposed. While the breach happened back in January, it wasn’t until this past Wednesday that the campaign issued a statement on the matter. This was precipitated by lists of the donors (and their information) being made available online.

Within the security world, caller ID is widely known to be broken. Its use as an authenticator SHOULD be none, as it’s trivially easy to spoof the information. Whether you’re using it to call your friends (and make it appear as their boss’ phone), or you’re using it to call the police, making them believe there’s a hostage situation at someone’s home, people place way too much faith in caller ID.

While not the first such service, 123Spoof looks to be making it the easiest to use, for Blackberry users anyway. Their service, an application that integrates with the Blackberry address book, will allow people to call anyone with forged caller ID information, has many international access numbers to use, and even has a voice changer available as an option. While currently free, the only cost to users is listening to a ten second advertisement before their call is connected.

Although most use of this service is likely to be harmless pranks between friends, providers recognize the very real possibility that their services will be used maliciously, and have created an opt-out registry to allow people to block their numbers from receiving spoofed calls.

Apology after prisoners’ health info goes missing - Lancashire Evening Post.

So, is it not secure to encrypt stuff and leave the password attached to the encrypted item? This security stuff is soooo hard! Good thing prisoners are kept busy and don’t have lots of time on their hands to file frivolous lawsuits, let alone real ones with legitimate complaints.

In response to November 2007’s loss of some seven million individuals’ banking information, Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson wrote

“Back in November, the Government lost two computer discs containing half the population’s bank details,” he said. “Everyone worked themselves into a right old lather about the mistake but I argued we should all calm down because the details in question are to be found on every cheque we hand out every day to every Tom, Dick and cash and carry.

Jeremy then proceeded to publish his banking details, as well as information about the car he drives and where to find his address. In a thoroughly unsurprising turn of events, he found himself the victim of identity theft, donating £500 through a non-signature debit to the British Diabetic Association.

Now, with the pain of identity theft having been personalized, he has changed his tune.

“Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy.”

Remember that prescreening frequent fliers could subject themselves to which would allow them to breeze through airport checkpoints? It turns out the data for some 33,000 travelers may have been exposed after the laptop was misplaced in San Francisco’s airport.

The thing is, the laptop was lost, and subsequently found, in the same locked room in which it had been left. They are now claiming, contrary to initial reports, that the data is secured by two levels of password protection. Now, if those levels are BIOS password and Windows login, yes, it is protected by two levels of protections, both of which are easily circumvented.

A settlement has been proposed between TJX and the lead plaintiffs for consumers who were affected. Divided into two classes are those whose financial details were exposed and those whose identity information was exposed. If you lost money, you can collect up to two $30 gift certificates, provided you can document the loss, including your wasted time at a princely $10 per hour. If you returned something without a receipt, and gave your driver’s license, you can collect three years of credit monitoring too. Oh, and they’re going to have a sale sometime in 2008 where you can get 15% off.

So, if a company implements shoddy security practices and causes mass card cancellation, as well as untold identity theft and consumer fraud, instead of quietly burying it, you turn it into a marketing event. Got it.

I have an $80 charge from 11/05 against a card that was used at TJX during the period that thieves had open access to the credit card details. Needless to say, FCRA’s 60 day dispute period is long gone, so a lawsuit against TJX may be my only reasonable recourse. Treble damages, court fees, time lost, and identity monitoring and theft protection come up to a tidy sum. Even if I accepted the class action settlement, I’d get, at most, $60 in gift certificates for my lost $80.

In this Information Week article, it is reported that TJ Maxx, poster child for the mother of all data disclosures, is being sued by banks. If you remember, they let loose some 45 million credit and debit cards. Figuring $25 cost for each exposed card incurred by a bank to void and reissue the card in question, you come up with somewhere north of a billion dollars as the cost of cleanup. Banks are not primarily in the “spending money out of the goodness of our hearts” business, and will want to collect on their costs, thus coming after the responsible party. Enter the class action suit, covering some 300 banks.

Prediction: This is just the first wave in this type of lawsuit. No longer will admonishment by the FTC or a “mea culpa” sent to customers be the biggest driver behind keeping data on lockdown. Now, private recovery costs will be the biggest stick in the game.

According to this article, a Massachusetts IHOP has recently found itself in hot water for requiring diners to leave a drivers license with the restaurant while eating. According to one patron, the security guard at the restaurant had “at least forty” licenses in his hand. Needless to say, this didn’t go over well with corporate, who issued a statement saying it was done without management’s approval.

Some 300,000 people and 9,000 employers have had their information placed at risk through a hacker accessing a backup server used by Nebraska’s Child Support Payment Center. Apparently, the hacker had access to the server for forty minutes, during which time they left a virus on it.

Why, if you had access to a system that handles $233 million a year, you would do something as mind-numbingly juvenile as planting a virus is beyond me. Fortunately, this is another example of one of the most important things that keeps society from crumbling down–Namely that criminals are stupid.

HSBC has recently had a fraud attempt originated by an offshore data-processing unit’s employee in Bangalore who accessed data and passed it along to associates in the UK. Around 20 accounts were compromised with losses pegged at approximately $425,000, for which HSBC is accepting full responsibility and reimbursing defrauded customers for. Needless to say, Indian officials are quick to point out that this kind of thing happens all the time, regardless of where the employees are.

According to a recent survey by the National Threat Assessment Center, the Secret Service’s research arm, some 85% of the threats against financial services firms come from insiders, not outsiders. Not surprisingly, financial gain motivates a vast majority of these attacks.  Surprisingly, 61% of these attacks are found by non-automated means. This underscores the need to ensure your employees are trained to recognize when things aren’t right and follow their instincts when it comes to potential fraud.