Max Ray Vision pleaded guilty to wire fraud today in a Pittsburgh federal court for stealing credit card and identity information from tens of thousands of people by hacking into the computers of financial institutions and credit card processing centers. Vision, who legally changed his name from Butler, used online aliases of “Iceman,” “Aphex,” “Digits”…
Author: Dissent
Pain and Suffering in the Aftermath of a Breach
One of the obstacles to consumer class action lawsuits in response to data breaches has been that most individuals cannot demonstrate actual harm, where harm is defined by the courts in financial terms. As Judge D. Brock Hornby explained when he threw out most of the Hannaford Bros. lawsuit, Maine state law requires that there…
Coffman on the Heartland Lawsuits
Tom Field of BankInfoSecurity.com has an interesting interview with Richard Coffman, the Texas attorney who filed the first class action lawsuit against Heartland Payment Systems (HPY). Coffman represents banks and financial institutions suing HPY. One of the more intriguing aspects of the interview has to do with why Coffman thinks that banks and financial institutions…
Fallout from the VA prescription database breach
The recent hacking of the Virginia prescription database is affecting some patients’ ability to obtain prescription medications, according to a report filed by the Associated Press: A House panel learned that powerful drugs such as Oxycontin, Valium, Vicodin and Ritalin are being withheld because pharmacists can’t check with the prescription drug database that still allows…
SCOTUS won't hear prescription data-mining case
The wire services are reporting that the U.S. Supreme Court will not hear an appeal by IMS Health Inc and Verispan that challenged a New Hampshire law would block companies from data-mining prescription information for the purpose of increasing drug sales. The companies had argued that the law violated their free speech rights. This is…
Celebrity Twitpic accounts hacked
The Associated Press is reporting that hackers were able to break into some Twitpic accounts due to a “vulnerability” in the system. The service allows Twitter users to share photographs, but is not owned by Twitter. The extent of the hack or its purpose was not reported, but the hackers reportedly sent out fake information…