Billy Wharton writes in CounterPunch: The mega drug store chain Rite Aid recently agreed to pay a $1 million fine to stave off a full investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) into practices that may have compromised customer records. The agreement was prompted by news reports that Rite Aid stores in several locations had…
Author: Dissent
De: Drugstore Schlecker customer information exposed on web
German drugstore chain Schlecker has suffered a major online data breach, with the names, addresses and profiles of about 150,000 customers being exposed on the internet, the company announced Friday. A spokesman for the firm confirmed media reports that the personal data of online customers had for an unspecified time found their way onto the…
3 areas where FUD needs to stop
Joan Goodchild writes: There is a new breed of animal appearing in the infosec community, according to Dr. Jimmy Blake, chief security officer for Mimecast, a cloud-services company based in London, and host of the blog Cloud Computing and Bad Behavior. The new breed is what he calls the “attention monger” (he actually used a…
Researcher Creates Clearinghouse Of 14 Million Hacked Passwords
Andy Greenberg reports: Canadian researcher Ron Bowes has created a sort of Wall of Sheep for the entire Internet. By simply collecting all the publicly-spilled repositories of users’ passwords from recent hacking incidents, he’s created a clearinghouse for stolen passwords on his Web site–14,488,929 distinct passwords to be exact, collected from 32,943,045 users. Bowes didn’t…
Longer passwords not solution to better security
Vivian Yeo reports on industry responses to a recent research report from the Georgia Tech Research Institute suggesting users should create longer, 12-character, passwords: … Ronnie Ng, Symantec’s systems engineering manager for Singapore, told ZDNet Asia that the username-and-password application is the “first and only layer of defense” for many information systems in organizations today….
FL: Tamarac woman says she stole ID to replace breast implants, furnish condo
Juan Ortega reports on a case of low-tech mail theft used for medical ID theft: A Tamarac woman told a judge she stole someone’s identity and spent nearly $20,000 in ill-gotten funds, largely because she needed to replace defective breast implants and furnish her condo. Shatarka Nuby, 29, offered that explanation to U.S. District Judge…