Andrew Kramer had an interesting item in the New York Times this week: Russia’s biggest retail bank is testing a machine that the old K.G.B. might have loved, an A.T.M. with a built-in lie detector intended to prevent consumer credit fraud. Consumers with no previous relationship with the bank could talk to the machine to…
Author: Dissent
Southern California Medical-Legal Consultants reveals that 300,000 workers’ compensation applicants’ names and Social Security Numbers were exposed on internet
Remember how Heartland Payment Systems took a lot of heat for announcing their breach at a time that coincided with President Obama’s inauguration? Since then, a lot of entities have been bashed a bit over the timing of their breach disclosures. As someone who tracks breaches, it became almost a given that I would find…
Epic Games Gets Hacked
It seems like everyone these days are getting their sites hacked and their data compromised. Just yesterday we did a post about Codemasters getting hit in a fresh attack by hackers and yesterday afternoon I received this email from Epic Games: Our Epic Games web sites and forums were recently hacked. After some downtime, they’re back up…
Novo Nordisk pays $1.725 million to resolve claims that sales representatives paid pharmacists for access to confidential patient information and to recommend their medications
It’s been an expensive week for Novo Nordisk. How expensive, you ask? How about $26.7 million to settle two government investigations? The following is a press release on the New York investigation about marketing and patient privacy: Novo Nordisk, Inc. has entered into a civil settlement agreement with the United States in which it has…
Virus on Penn State Altoona computer may have put 12,000 alumni, faculty, and staff Social Security Numbers in hacker’s hands
Russ O’Reilly reports: Thousands of faculty, staff and former students at Penn State Altoona are examining their bank accounts and credit reports this week after receiving a letter that their personal information could be at risk after a security breach in the university’s database. A computer virus created with malicious intent to steal information breached…
Stephen Foley: Calm down – despite the data breaches, there’s little actual fraud on the cards
Stephen Foley comments in The Independent on the recent CitiGroup breach and tries to prevent kneejerk reactions. He writes, in part: […] There have been 288 publicly disclosed breaches of financial services companies’ computer systems, according to the Identity Theft Resource Centre, and 83 million customer records compromised. That would suggest that, even if you…