George Diepenbrock reports: A 33-year-old Kansas City, Kan., man, who once lived in Lawrence, has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for an identity theft scheme in Lawrence and the Kansas City area that totaled more than $78,000. William A. Morris had pleaded guilty in September to one count of aggravated identity theft…
Author: Dissent
Albuquerque woman indicated for ID theft affecting dozens
The Associated Press is reporting that Helen Bates of Albuquerque was indicated as part of an ID theft and forgery ring. Documents found at her home included credit cards of 31 people as well as photocopies of checks issued to a gas station where she had worked between October 2005 and October 2007. So far,…
Heartland: It’s not just banks
Because BankInfoSecurity.com has been doing such a terrific job of trying to identify financial institutions affected by the Heartland Payment Systems breach, it’s easy to forget that there were other types of entities affected. The Contra Costa Community College District was also affected by the breach because it uses Heartland to process online fee payments,…
Congress heard us! (commentary)
I’m first working my way through the provisions in the stimulus bill that relate to breaches and notifications. One of the recommendations that I and other privacy advocates had made was central notification and disclosure on a publicly available web site. They heard us. Here’s part of the new law: (3) NOTICE TO SECRETARY- Notice…
It’s Symantec’s turn (updated with response from Symantec)
A hackers’ group has seemingly managed to embarrass another security vendor. After revealing that Kaspersky, BitDefender Portugal, and F-Secure all had vulnerabilities in their sites, the hacker has now reported a blind SQL injection of emea.symantec.com. It’s not clear from the report what kinds of information might have been accessible via the attack. Symantec.com has…
Wikileaks Forced to Leak Its Own Secret Info
Ryan Singel reports: What’s Wikileaks, the net’s foremost document leaking site, supposed to do when a whistle-blower submits a list of email addresses belonging to the site’s confidential donors as a leaked document? That’s exactly the conundrum Wikileaks faced this week after someone from the controversial whistle-blowing site sent an emergency fund-raising appeal on Saturday…