April 7th, 2010 I am not done nor will I ever be done sounding that alarm, ringing that bell and informing you about how ridiculous social media is. I was asked in a radio interview today what it will take to get people to recognize they are sharing too much data. In a word, tragedy. When a home [...]
April 6th, 2010 Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Albert Gonzalez and his gang of criminal hackers were responsible for data breaches in retailers and payment processors, with some estimates saying they breached over 230 million records combined. Gonzalez, considered a proficient criminal hacker, provided “dumps,” a term which refers to stolen credit card data, to “carders.” “Carders” are the [...]
April 5th, 2010 Computerworld reported that a hacker threatened to expose health data and demanded $10 million from a government agency. The alleged ransom note posted on the Virginia DHP Prescription Monitoring Program site claimed that the hacker had backed up and encrypted more than 8 million patient records and 35 million prescriptions [...]
March 25th, 2010 Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
The Wall Street Journal reports under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.
There are too many forms of identification floating around [...]
March 25th, 2010 Lets face it, if you had it you’d spend it, and what better way than on your families security! In today’s high tech connected world a networked and remotely monitored home security system is the way to go.
Keyless Access: Door locks that require a pincode make it easier to access without fumbling for keys. [...]
March 19th, 2010 Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Today, copy machines, fax machines and many printers are just like computers; they’re smart and they have hard drives or flash drives and can store data that can be extracted. Peripherals in the olden days, just like when dot-com was a significant part of a person’s stock portfolio, were dumb.
Because [...]
March 10th, 2010 Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Skimming data off of debit and credit cards has been happening at ATMs, gas pumps and electronic funds transfer point of sale terminals for quite some time.
When criminals plant skimming devices, they have to physically attach a skimming device that fits over the face of the ATM’s card slot. Then [...]
March 9th, 2010 Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Naiveté: A lack of sophistication or worldliness. That sums up a lot of people I know. “There’s a sucker born every minute” is a phrase often credited to P.T. Barnum (1810 – 1891), an American showman. It is generally taken to mean that there are (and always will be) a lot [...]
March 7th, 2010 New Hampshire, USA. “Live Free or Die,” baby. The official state motto emblazoned on every NH license plate has always intrigued. The thought of someone from NH might bring to mind revolutionaries or America militia sympathizers. New Hampshire has come a long way since its motto was created in 1945 and is not much different [...]
February 22nd, 2010 Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Dan Yost Chief Technology Officer of MyLaptopGPS brought attention to the Ponemon Institute, with sponsorship from PGP, has released their “Fifth Annual U.S. Cost of Data Breach Study.” As usual, the report is a treasure trove of great data (just like most people’s laptops are).
The average cost per breached data record [...]