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…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Verizon Business, U.S. Secret Service to Join Forces on 2010 Data Breach Investigations Report
As part of its continuing effort to better understand security breaches and how they can be prevented, Verizon is joining forces with the United States Secret Service on this year’s Data Breach Investigations Report. The 2010 DBIR, slated to be issued this summer, will feature aggregated findings from Verizon’s own caseload as well as hundreds…
Announce A Data Breach And Say It’s No Big Deal?
Evan Schuman comments on the recent Blippy breach and lessons that should be learned: Data Breach Etiquette Rule #8: The moment you announce you screwed up and exposed customers’ payment data to cyberthieves is a really bad time to lecture customers that “it’s a lot less bad than it looks” and that “it’s important to…
Podcast: Inside the TJX/Heartland Investigations
Tom Field of BankInfoSecurity interviews Kim Peretti, former Senior Counsel in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice, about the investigation of Albert Gonzalez and his co-conspirators, including How the investigations unfolded from beginning to end; The significance of the conspirators’ sentences; Lessons learned…
First-Ever Global Cost of a Data Breach Study Shows Organisations Paid USD3.43 million per Breach in 2009
Privacy and information management research firm Ponemon Institute, together with PGP Corporation, a global leader in trusted data protection, today announced the results of the first-ever global study into the costs incurred by organisations after experiencing a data breach. The 2009 Annual Study: Global Cost of a Data Breach report, compiled by The Ponemon Institute…
UK: NHS responsible for third of data breaches
Jennifer Scott reports: The deputy commissioner of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has named and shamed the NHS as the worst offender when it comes to data breaches. During the opening keynote at InfoSecurity Europe 2010, David Smith highlighted the health service’s blunders over the past two years where it accounted for almost a third…