The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has found Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) in breach of the Data Protection Act after an unencrypted laptop belonging to the former Chelsea Building Society (CBS), which had recently merged with YBS, was stolen from its Cheltenham premises. The laptop contained a substantial part of the CBS customer database. The laptop…
Category: Financial Sector
Confessions of an ATM Hacker
Tracy Kitten writes: I caught up this week with Barnaby Jack, the so-called ethical hacker who cracked the operating systems of two retail ATMs during last month’s Black Hat Technical Security Conference in Vegas. Jack, who heads research for IOActive Labs, a privately held computer and network security firm in San Francisco, hacked two commonly…
Banks Complicit in Fraud — Is it Systemic?
Naomi Wolf has followed up on her recent column about her experiences with WaMu and fraud by describing her shock at discovering how widespread such problems are and the e-mails she received from readers. Well, I certainly now felt less alone — but far more outraged and alarmed, on behalf of all of us, especially…
Swiss Bank Data Studied by Baden-Wuerttemberg for $1 Billion in Unpaid Tax
Patrick Donahue reports: German authorities in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg are examining tax information offered by an informant detailing what may be illicit funds stashed in Swiss accounts, though they said they won’t buy stolen data. Finance Ministry officials in the southwestern region received an offer from an informant who claimed to have information on…
UK insurer hit with biggest ever data loss fine
John Oates reports: Zurich Insurance must pay an enormous £2.3m fine for losing thousands of British people’s personal data. The fine was imposed not by the Information Commissioner’s Office but by the Financial Services Authority. Zurich Insurance lost 46,000 customer records including some bank details when a tape back-up went missing between two sites in…
Judge approves Countrywide Financial ID theft settlement
A federal judge on Monday granted final approval to a settlement between Countrywide Financial Corp. and millions of customers left at high risk for identity theft because of a security breach. The breach and terms of the settlement have been previously covered on this site and in PogoWasRight.org’s archives, but the Associated Press story provides…