Robert McMillan reports: Facebook has identified the hacker named Kirllos who tried to sell 1.5 million Facebook accounts recently in underground hacking forums. According to the investigators at the social networking site, he’s guilty of both hacking and hyperbole. Kirllos was first spotted by researchers at VeriSign’s iDefense group a few weeks after he claimed…
Category: Breach Types
UCSF employee charged with wire fraud
Henry K. Lee reports: A UCSF Medical Center employee has been charged in federal court with wire fraud for allegedly using the Social Security numbers of fellow workers to complete online health surveys so that he could receive hundreds of $100 vouchers. From January to April, Cam Giang of San Francisco used other UC employees’…
Picante restaurant is victim of credit card scam
Frances Dinkelspiel reports: Picante, the popular Mexican restaurant on 6th Street [in Berkeley, California] , has been the target of an international credit card fraud operation, its owner says today. Thieves from as far away as Russia managed to penetrate the restaurant’s credit card encryption system and steal the numbers of dozens of customers, says…
Judge won’t accept pleas in Jackson Memorial Hospital ID theft case
Jay Weaver reports: A husband-and-wife duo charged with running a racket to pilfer patient records from Jackson Memorial Hospital to sell to lawyers for injury claims tried to plead guilty Tuesday in Miami federal court. But U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard said she couldn’t accept their pleas because she didn’t think the prescribed punishment fit…
IRS Divulges Personal Taxpayer Information
The Internal Revenue Service does not always properly authenticate the identity of taxpayers calling its toll-free assistance lines before providing them with confidential tax account information, according to a new government report. The report, by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, found that taxpayers who call the IRS-toll-free lines are at risk of having…
Heartland breach expenses pegged at $140M — so far
Jaikumar Vijayan reports: The costs to Heartland Payment Systems Inc. from the massive data breach that it disclosed in January 2009 appear to be steadily adding up. Quarterly financial results released by Heartland last week show that the card payment processor has accrued $139.4 million in breach-related expenses. The figure includes a settlement totaling nearly…