A jury has convicted a Miami Beach, Fla., man and his driver for their roles in a telemarketing fraud and identity theft scheme that attempted to defraud financial institutions and their account holders throughout the United States of millions of dollars through the unauthorized debit of customer bank accounts, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced…
Category: Of Note
Broad New Hacking Attack Detected
Siobhan Gorman reports: Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach. The damage from the latest cyberattack…
Massive security breach suspected at Latvian tax office
The State Revenue Service (VID) in Latvia admitted Monday that its electronic security systems may have been breached and that millions of confidential documents could have been hacked. The Latvian television news programme De Facto said Sunday night that 120 gigabytes of data consisting of 7.4 million individual documents had been leaked from VID’s database…
Swiss MP threatens fire with fire over bank data
When diplomacy fails, play hardball. A Swiss member of parliament alleged Saturday that top German public officials had secret bank accounts in Switzerland and threatened to out them if Germany bought stolen data on tax dodgers. ”If Germany buys stolen bank data, we’ll push for a legislative change that would have to disclose all Swiss…
Call center employee attempts to extort German health insurer
Die Krankheitskarte web site reports: German health insurance company (or rather: sickness fund) “BKK Gesundheit” was eager to outsource its telephone hotline to a virtual call center. In their home offices, the untrained workers then could retrieve data they weren’t allowed to see, including medical diagnoses. They all had access to „an unneccessary huge amount…
Lawrence Welk Resort Furious with Visa
Elizabeth Banicki reports: The Lawrence Welk Resort says a tech company disabled its computer security system, making 1,427 customers’ credit cards vulnerable to ID theft. Welk says it paid Micros Systems $100,000 for the botched job, to “ensure compliance with evolving Visa and other industry security standards,” and that Visa, for “no legitimate reason,” ordered…