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Struggling to Comply With PCI Standards? Start With SSO April 21, 2008 Since 2005, millions of citizens have been affected by reported and unreported data breaches at payment processors, banks and retailers -- but the nation was still stunned when news broke out about the TJX data breach. This has indeed been a larger problem than most recognize, with some 88 million consumers affected by data breaches in the past two years alone, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Publishers, Advertisers, Consumers Pick Sides in Online Tracking Debate April 17, 2008 A firestorm of fury has erupted over behavioral tracking -- the tracking of consumers online by marketing companies and advertisers to serve them up with targeted advertisements when they're on the Web. Both consumer organizations and trade and industry groups have responded to the Federal Trade Commission's call for comments on its proposal to control behavioral tracking.

Smarter Than Your Average Card April 17, 2008 Think having a credit or debit card with your photo on it is cool? Well, how about a card the same size and thickness as a credit card, with a window that shows a passcode, and with a public key infrastructure chip on it? When you need to use the card, press on its switch and the PKI chip will run an algorithm that generates a one-time passcode for you to use.

It's Almost Tax Day: Do You Know Where Your Identity Is? April 14, 2008 Spending your tax refund before it arrives? You might want to rethink that plan -- and not just because it's fiscally imprudent. There is a growing chance that this tax season you'll learn for the first time that you were the victim of identity theft at some point during the last year.

Yahoo Scrambles, Scrabble Scraps, Chertoff Coaxes April 11, 2008 Unwilling to believe that resistance to a Microsoft takeover is futile, Yahoo is throwing a lot of strategies at the wall to see what sticks. Its latest effort is a trial advertising partnership with Google -- a two-week test of its AdSense service. Yahoo plans to run Google ads alongside up to 3 percent of the search results generated on Yahoo Web properties in the U.S.

Security Sleuths Search for a Single Sign-On Solution April 08, 2008 Project Concordia -- formed last year by vendors offering electronic identity products to create a harmonized standard and ensure identity initiatives and protocols can interoperate -- held a series of demonstrations by seven vendors: FuGen Solutions, Internet2, Microsoft, Oracle, Ping Identity, Sun Microsystems and Symlabs.

Hannaford: Malware Caused Massive Data Breach March 28, 2008 Scarborough, Maine-based Hannaford Bros. in a Boston Globe report Friday confirmed that malware that had been installed on the 271-store chain's servers led to a data breach that compromised as many as 4.2 million debit and credit card accounts. Hannaford told Massachusetts regulators that it found the malware but it didn't know how it got into the system, the Globe reported.

Social Security, Social Anxiety March 20, 2008 Having your private information leaked is bad enough, but having it put on BitTorrent is really the final insult. It happened before with MySpace photos. By most accounts, the private images made available earlier this year via peer-to-peer networks consisted mostly of poorly snapped photos of people you didn't know getting drunk at parties you weren't at. Then there's the incident with Harvard.

Training Your Sights on Online Fraud March 20, 2008 Fraud is big business. Well-funded, well-orchestrated, sophisticated fraud rings aggressively change tactics and invent new technologies to cash in on the unprotected assets awaiting plunder. Every organization that provides individual service to its customers, employees, members or community is faced with the very real concern of gaining and keeping their users' trust.

The Never-Ending Struggle for Malware Containment March 08, 2008 The IT security front is like any war: Secure one battle line and a breach may occur on another. Red flags about malware have become almost a daily occurrence in the virtual world, and the malware lexicon has mushroomed in recent years. Terms like "zombie," "rootkit," "worm," "Trojan," "spyware," "botnet" and others are descriptors of some of the most worrisome IT issues extant.

Secure E-Commerce From First to Final Click February 27, 2008 What's most important to consumers when making a purchase online? Personal identity. Consumers are taking more notice of their individual online security after a string of recent identity theft cases made major headlines. According to a recent survey by University of Southern California's Center for the Digital Future, 61 percent of adult Americans said they were very or extremely concerned about the privacy of personal information when buying online, an increase from 47 percent in 2006.

Who's Winning the ID Theft War? February 26, 2008 Depending on which set of criteria you reference, ID fraud either is on a significant decline or will be a lingering threat for several more years. The general trend points downward. Overall, 2007 saw a 12 percent drop in ID fraud incidences to $6 billion, according to Javelin Strategy & Research's report released in February.

Practicing Safe E-Commerce February 23, 2008 Despite the overwhelming success of e-commerce, there are still consumers out there too terrified to click their cart through a virtual checkout. Are they just a silly-nilly group, nutty as a bunch of conspiracy theorists? Or are the rest of us just too naive to get it? Neither, it turns out.

Mad-as-Hell Best Buy Customer Files $54M Lawsuit Over Laptop Loss February 14, 2008 A frustrated Best Buy customer has filed a $54 million lawsuit against the electronics retailer in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Her complaint? Best Buy lost the laptop she had brought in for repair; the tech staff was evasive about its whereabouts; and the store refused to compensate her fully for her loss.

The Cost of ID Theft, Part 2: Fixing the System February 06, 2008 As the number of identity theft victims continues to mount, so has the amount of data and information related to such events -- and the time and resources devoted to better understanding, analyzing and devising measures that can better prevent such occurrences. "The stakes are already quite high when it comes to data loss," noted Uriel Maimon, senior researcher for security firm RSA.

The Cost of ID Theft, Part 1: Beyond Dollars and Cents February 05, 2008 Private, personally identifying information is everywhere, from portable computers and digital devices, to the Internet and private networks. This data can be obtained so easily -- either through technology or more mundane means -- and its theft is so often glamorized on film, that it is starting to attract a younger generation to criminal ranks.

Yahoo Adds Its Muscle to OpenID Single Sign-On Standard January 17, 2008 Yahoo, with its 248 million active registered users worldwide, has announced that all of them will be able to use their Yahoo IDs as an OpenID to let them eliminate separate IDs and logins at Web sites that support the open, decentralized digital identity framework.

Facebook Puts a Face on Defendants in Hacker Suit December 18, 2007 Facebook has named three individuals and a Canadian porn company -- Brian Fabian, Josh Raskin, Ming Wu and Slickcash.com -- as defendants in a federal lawsuit it filed earlier this year in the Northern District of California, which accused unnamed people and companies of unlawfully accessing its servers.

Dollars and Sense: Calculating PCI Noncompliance Costs December 12, 2007 Despite being given a deadline of Sept. 30, 2007, to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, many Level 1 merchants -- those that process more than 6 million transactions per year -- still do not meet the necessary requirements. In fact, Visa reports that as much as 40 percent of its Level 1 merchants fall into this category.

TJX to Shell Out $41M in Data Breach Settlement November 30, 2007 The price tag on the largest database breach on record moved higher Friday with TJX agreeing to pay nearly $41 million to settle with credit card companies and banks that were forced to issue new cards to customers of the retailer to prevent or recover fraudulent charges.