Macrocosmic Technologies

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.

According to the KATU TV web site, a trojan downloaded from a porn site by an Oregon Department of Revenue employee exposed the names, addresses, and social security numbers of some 2200 residents.

There’s some bad juju out there, there’s no denying that. It’s painfully evident that spyware needs to be addressed at the enterprise level. Anyone who says otherwise is itching for a fight*.

* Apologies to Michael Feldman

According to a recent article, an unclassified computer belonging to the DOE was hacked in September of 2005, and had a file containing names, social security numbers, and security clearances for 1500 employees stolen. Frighteningly, senior management was only made aware of this two days ago, or nearly nine months after the fact.

What separates this incident from most data disclosures is that the article makes this out to be a TARGETED theft of data, rather than randomly stealing hardware that happens to contain sensitive data. In this case, the data was the target.

Personal information, including social security numbers, was stolen last month from the home of a VA official last month. Some 2.2 million people, including up to 80% of current active military personnel, are affected. The breakdown is 1.1 million active-duty military personnel, 430,000 National Guard members and 645,000 reserve members. The information includes names, dates of birth, and social security numbers.

One day, increasingly soon given the current rate of egregious data disclosures, anyone handling sensitive or confidential information will be required by law to encrypt it and protect it. Already, HIPAA and The Graham Leach Bliley Act place these requirements on entities that handle medical or financial information. While these are good ideas, they’re simply the first steps to providing comprehensive protection for all of everyone’s private information.

Particularly worrisome about this loss is the fact that while senior VA officials were aware of the loss within hours, it wasn’t until nearly TWO WEEKS later that the VA secretary was notified. According to the Washington Post article covering the data loss, the analyst who had the laptop and hard drive removed from his home had been taking the data for at least three years.

Ye Olde Register is reporting that Ernst & Young has followed up its February loss of four laptops with losing only one, but this one happened to contain information about nearly a quarter of a million of Hotels.com’s customers. From a joint letter by E&Y and Hotels.com to its customers:

“Unfortunately, the computer contained certain information about customer transactions with Hotels.com, and other sites through which we provide booking services directly to customers, from 2002 through 2004.

“This information may have included your name, address and some credit or debit card information you provided at that time.”

Maybe I should have given my itinerary to a globetrotting garden gnome instead… If you’re interested, Ernst & Young does offer an IT Security and Risk Management practice. I have to wonder though, if they’ve ever heard the phrase, “Eat your own dog food.”