The hack of the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program may have serious consequences for contractor Northrop Grumman. The company had received a 10-year $2.3 billion state contract to upgrade the state’s computer system. According to stories in the Washington Post and Daily Press, the state has had issues with Northrop Grumman over the past few years…
Category: Of Note
CFTC Fines Interbank for Security Breach
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission today simultaneously filed and settled charges against Interbank FX, LLC (Interbank), ordering Interbank to pay a $200,000 civil monetary penalty for violating rules designed to protect the confidential personal information of consumers. The CFTC order also requires Interbank to establish a comprehensive security program that provides administrative, technical, and…
CardersMarket.com Boss Pleads Guilty
Max Ray Vision pleaded guilty to wire fraud today in a Pittsburgh federal court for stealing credit card and identity information from tens of thousands of people by hacking into the computers of financial institutions and credit card processing centers. Vision, who legally changed his name from Butler, used online aliases of “Iceman,” “Aphex,” “Digits”…
Pain and Suffering in the Aftermath of a Breach
One of the obstacles to consumer class action lawsuits in response to data breaches has been that most individuals cannot demonstrate actual harm, where harm is defined by the courts in financial terms. As Judge D. Brock Hornby explained when he threw out most of the Hannaford Bros. lawsuit, Maine state law requires that there…
Blue Chip FTP Logins on Server
Security researchers have found a treasure chest of FTP passwords, some from high profile sites, on an open cybercrime server. Jacques Erasmus, CTO at security tools firm Prevx, stumbled across a site where a Trojan is uploading FTP login credentials captured from compromised machines. So far, Erasmus has found logins for ftp.bbc.co.uk, ftp.cisco.com, ftp.amazon.com, ftp.monster.com…
MA Regs Trumps the Feds
A privacy bill under consideration in Washington would significantly impact retail through provisions that would spell out how companies would have to protect customer data and what they must do if information is compromised, yet, as worrisome as that might be for some, any concern is essentially moot because a Massachusetts regulation with substantially the…