James McCarthy reports: A fraud expert was shocked to receive a confidential letter from a major bank – complete with the private account details of 14 other customers. Anne Gwilliam said that when she phoned Lloyds TSB to alert them, the operator told her the gaffe was a “major security breach” and promised someone would…
Author: Dissent
FTC Says Mortgage Broker Broke Data Security Laws: Dumpster Wrong Place for Consumers’ Personal Information
The Federal Trade Commission has charged a mortgage broker with discarding consumers’ tax returns, credit reports, and other sensitive personal and financial information in an unsecured dumpster, in violation of federal law. According to the FTC, in December 2006, approximately 40 boxes containing consumer records were found in a publicly-accessible dumpster. The records included tax…
UK: Hackers tried to steal hundreds of millions from bank, court told
David Brown reports: An international gang plotted to steal £229 million from customers’ accounts at a leading bank by hacking into computers, a court was told yesterday. A security supervisor smuggled two Belgian computer hackers into the London offices of Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation by pretending that they were friends who had arrived for a…
Customer Says Local Bank Warned Of Potential Security Breach
Curiouser and curiouser… Forcht Bank’s spokesperson originally told a news source that they had been told by First Data Corporation that a breach involving 8,500 debit cards was due to a retail merchant. Subsequent news stories indicated that Forcht’s breach was part of the Heartland Payment Systems breach. A request for clarification from Forcht was…
Two incidents — or three? And one gang — or more?
First we learned of a breach at RBS WorldPay detected on November 10th that resulted in fraud on at least 100 accounts. Yesterday we learned of a breach at Heartland Payment Systems that presumably was going on during the fall and that has already been blamed for fraud in approximately 85 cases. And in-between, we…
Two credit unions report debit card misuse linked to Heartland breach
Yesterday, we reported that Piedmont Credit Union in North Carolina had reported that 15 of its members were reporting fraudulent use of their Visa-issued debit cards, mostly at gas stations in Florida. We also reported that Oregon Territory Federal Credit Union members were reporting misuse of their debit cards. At the time of the initial…