As I tweeted last night, Experian has sued the former owner/shareholder of Court Ventures over the mess Experian found itself in when it acquired Court Ventures and later learned that a criminal had been using a Court Ventures account to access a U.S InfoSearch database with information on over 200 million Americans. Today, Jim Finkle…
5-year-old Ocean Beach boy exposes Microsoft Xbox vulnerability
Michael Chen reports: A young Ocean Beach boy is in the spotlight after he discovered a back door in to one of the most popular gaming systems in the world. When 5-year-old Kristoffer Von Hassel is playing his Xbox, his feet don’t touch the ground. But something he did has made the smartest guys at…
25 Defendants Charged In Separate Schemes That Resulted In Thousands Of Identities Stolen And Millions Of Dollars In Identity Theft Tax Filings
Posting much of a lengthy press release here because I think you can expect to see follow-ups on this blog for some of these prosecutions. Some of the emphasis added by me: Wifredo A. Ferrer, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Jose A. Gonzalez, Special Agent in Charge, Internal Revenue Service, Criminal…
Man convicted of conspiring to steal and misuse Chase customers’ info gets aggravated identity theft conviction overturned
Tim Hull reports: A man who admitted to a $300,000 fraud on Chase Bank is not guilty of aggravated identity theft, the 9th Circuit ruled Thursday. Doren Ward conceded that in 2011 he worked with co-consipirators in the United Kingdom to steal the personal information of various Chase Bank customers and impersonate them to obtain…
German officials confirm 18 million emails and passwords stolen
DW reports that there’s been another large data theft reported in Germany: Another mass hacking of private data was confirmed by German officials on Thursday, this time involving 18 million email addresses and passwords. Authorities in the northwestern city of Verden discovered the trove of information, according to the city’s public prosecutor Lutz Gaebel. Unidentified…
FL: Social Security Numbers of 530 Polk County School District Employees Exposed
Greg Parlier reports: The Social Security numbers of 530 Polk County School District employees were available to the public online for two years until they were taken down last month, district officials said Thursday. Mike Perrone, the School District’s chief financial officer who oversees human resources, said the numbers were part of a large document…