The chairman of the powerful U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, is trying—after two failed attempts—to get his data breach bill made into law. But even though his bill would answer the pleas of many retailers by creating one single national standard for handling major retail data breaches, the bill’s details don’t deliver the…
Author: Dissent
Credit card blunder not the first transaction error
A Carterton resident caught in a BNZ [Bank of New Zealand] privacy breach says his scrupulous home audits have uncovered similar transaction errors and saved him thousands. The man, who declined to be named, triggered a BNZ blunder after a check of their credit card statement in January revealed a $20 transaction source out of…
ID theft ring allegedly bribed DMV employees
Counter-terrorism investigators busted an alleged identity theft ring whose members are suspected of bribing Department of Motor Vehicles employees in Inglewood and several states to provide fake documents. Los Angeles police, the FBI, DMV and District Attorney’s Office teamed up to track a Pakistani woman and 13 alleged accomplices, the Los Angeles Times reported on…
When is personal data truly de-identified?
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is about to rule whether health care entities will need to notify patients if their de-identified data — patient data that has been stripped of all potential for identifying individuals, which is often used for research and development — is breached. As it stands now, de-identified…
Brighton laptop stolen while IT engineer golfed
Anger is seething among several employees of the city of Brighton (Colorado) whose bank account numbers, social security numbers and addresses may have been compromised by the city’s lead IT engineer. Jeromy King was playing in a charity golf tournament Monday at the Ranch County Club in Westminster when someone apparently took a laptop computer…
Credit industry slow to protect customers from CreditMaster scam
Recent cases in which people have been charged with online fraud for allegedly making purchases with illegally obtained credit card numbers have shed light on the lack of effective measures taken to frustrate the CreditMaster scam used in these incidents, even though the credit card industry was already aware of its existence. The industry is…