David Landes reports: Debit card information for tens of thousands of Swedish banking customers may have fallen into the wrong hands following a security breach at card manufacturers MasterCard and Visa. Computer systems at both card makers were breached recently, allowing hackers to get away with data on thousands of banking cards, the Aftonbladet newspaper…
Category: Of Note
Schwarzenegger vetoes Simitian’s privacy protection bill
Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed State Senator Joe Simitian’s (D-Palo Alto) Senate Bill 20. The bill would have strengthened and updated California’s landmark privacy protection law that requires businesses and state agencies to notify residents when sensitive personal information is lost or stolen from their databases. “I’m surprised as well as disappointed by the Governor’s veto,“ said…
Big-Box Breach: The Inside Story of Wal-Mart’s Hacker Attack
Kim Zetter reports: Wal-Mart was the victim of a serious security breach in 2005 and 2006 in which hackers targeted the development team in charge of the chain’s point-of-sale system and siphoned source code and other sensitive data to a computer in Eastern Europe, Wired.com has learned. Internal documents reveal for the first time that…
Two charged in superseding indictment for their roles in a $30 million bank fraud and ID theft ring
A Miami Beach, Fla., man and his driver were charged Thursday in a Superseding Indictment 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 and fraudulent debit of customer bank accounts. Acting…
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…
Researcher refutes phishing account of hijacked Hotmail passwords
Gregg Keizer reports: One researcher isn’t buying Microsoft’s and Google’s explanation that hijacked Hotmail and Gmail passwords were obtained in a massive phishing attack. Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher at San Francisco-based ScanSafe, said it’s more likely that the massive lists — which include approximately 30,000 credentials from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and other…