Byron Acohido provides a write-up of some of the TJX and Heartland Payment Systems incidents that emphasizes the point that many hacks go undetected or unnoticed — and that cyberthieves often take considerable time to start and continue stealing data: Companies, understandably, rarely discuss data breaches. However, proof that data thieves are targeting hundreds of…
Category: ID Theft
NM: Dropped ID leads to crime ring arrests
From the thank-goodness-for-dumb-criminals dept. Amber Lee of KOAT in Albuquerque reports: Three men and two women are in custody on suspicion of running what police say was a identity theft ring. Investigators say what started as a purse snatching turned into something much bigger, when one of the suspects left behind an obvious clue. “In…
Operation Phish Phry reels in 100 in U.S. and Egypt
The largest number of defendants ever charged in a cyber crime case have been indicted in a multinational investigation conducted in the United States and Egypt that uncovered a sophisticated “phishing” operation that fraudulently collected personal information from thousands of victims that was used to defraud American banks. This morning, authorities in several United States…
Hannaford breach case not over yet
Trevor Maxwell reports: Just as a potential class-action lawsuit against Hannaford Bros. appeared dead, there’s a glimmer of hope this week for consumers who hope to recover damages from the Scarborough-based grocer for a massive electronic data theft in late 2007 and early 2008. The federal judge overseeing the case plans to ask Maine’s highest…
IT analyst at NY Fed Reserve Bank pleads guilty to ID theft scheme
A former employee of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, Curtis L. Wiltshire, pleaded guilty today to one count of bank fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft for having obtained student loans using stolen identities. Kenneth Wiltshire, Curtis Wiltshire’s brother, pleaded guilty to related charges on September 15, 2009. According to the…
Lawsuits over Heartland data breach folded into one
Jaikumar Vijayan reports: A lawsuit consolidating 16 separate class-action complaints brought by financial institutions against Heartland Payment Systems Inc. has been filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. […] The amended complaint includes for the first time several statements that Heartland is alleged to have made regarding the controls it had…