http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081027085101523
Identity theft ringleader gets 4 years in prison
Monday, October 27 2008 @ 08:51 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
A French national has been sentenced to more than four years in prison for heading an identity theft ring that enlisted restaurant servers to swipe information from customers' credit cards in Southern California.
A federal judge in Santa Ana on Friday also ordered Kresimir Matuzovic to pay $1.3 million in restitution to banks he defrauded as part of his scheme.
Source - San Francisco Chronicle
Related Lawyers: Advise your rich, ID Theft clients to hire limos rather than drive themselves!
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081028050852384
NE: Stolen ID Sentencing
Tuesday, October 28 2008 @ 05:08 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
... Eric J. Jordan was arrested in May 2008 after a traffic stop. At the time, Sheriff Kevin Stukenholtz said Jordan attempted to steal a cruiser after being pulled over.
In Jordan’s possession were false ID’s and thousands of stolen personal documents. There was so much mail in his car, deputies could not see through it.
Source - WOWT
More than meets the eye?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/28/0436243&from=rss
Student Charged With Three Felonies for Finding Security Flaw — and Reporting it
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday October 28, @05:35AM from the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished dept.
Well, yet another teenage hacker who "did the right thing" by reporting a security flaw is being punished for his actions. Although it definitely sounds like the whole story may not be in the clear yet, a 15-year-old New York high school student has been charged with three felonies claiming that he accessed a file containing social security numbers, driver's license numbers, and home addresses of past and present employees ... and then sent an anonymous email to the principal alerting him to the security flaw.
"All that was needed to access the information was a district password. School officials have admitted that thousands of students, faculty and employees could have accessed the same file for up to two weeks."
Related? Wise folks, those Canadians
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/27/2134214&from=rss
Canadian Court Rules "Hyperlink" Is Not Defamation
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday October 27, @06:54PM from the don't-tread-on-my-links dept. The Courts The Internet
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes
"In a landmark ruling, a Canadian court has ruled that a web site's publication of hyperlinks to an allegedly defamatory web site is not in and of itself a 'publication,' and therefore cannot in and of itself constitute defamation. In a 10-page decision [PDF], Crookes v. Wikimedia, Sup. Ct., British Columbia, Judge Keller dismissed the libel case against Jon Newton, the publisher of p2pnet.net, which was based on the fact that his article contained links to the allegedly defamatory site, since hyperlinks, the Court reasoned, are analogous to footnotes, rather than constituting a 'republication.' Mr. Newton was represented in the case by famous libel, slander, and civil liberties lawyer Dan Burnett of Vancouver, British Columbia."
Why should we assume this happens only to outsourced (off-shored actually) call centers?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081027120510393
How Outsourced Call Centers Are Costing Millions In Identity Theft
Monday, October 27 2008 @ 12:05 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
A former Chase call center rep tells the story about this one thief who was able to rip off one customer for over $40,000, thanks to his constant outwitting out the internationally out-sourced security department. It wasn't that hard. Over and over again, he was able to commit credit card fraud just knowing the guy's name, social, and mother's maiden name.
Source - The Consumerist
Related – an interesting idea but probably will come about through “Don't export jobs” laws, which of course are impossible to implement...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081028050710229
AU: Do-not-export register wanted for data transfer
Tuesday, October 28 2008 @ 05:07 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
PRIVACY advocates have proposed a register for Australians concerned about proposed changes that would allow businesses to send customer information to "dangerous" countries such as Russia.
Professor Graham Greenleaf, director of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre at the University of NSW, says a Do Not Send Export my Data list will prove just as popular as the Do Not Call register, which now has more than 2.5 million subscribers who do not want to be called by direct marketers.
"If your bank manager said the bank had an amazing outsourcing deal, and it was going to send all your details to Russia, you'd be justifiably worried about your privacy," Greenleaf says.
Source - Australian IT
The value of a stolen ID has been falling for years as they devolve from the “luxury goods” category (available only on the criminal equivalent of Rodeo Drive) to “commodity goods” available at any 7-11.
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=2008102715213057
Hackonomics
Monday, October 27 2008 @ 03:21 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
Your personal identity isn't worth quite as much as it used to be—at least to thieves willing to swipe it.
According to experts who monitor such markets, the value of stolen credit card data may range from $3 to as little as 40 cents. That's down tenfold from a decade ago—even though the cost to an individual who has a credit card stolen can soar into the hundreds of dollars.
Source - Newsweek
Sometimes articles make me giggle...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081027081010394
UK: Lawyers Found Guilty of Failing to Defend Their Clients
Monday, October 27 2008 @ 08:10 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
Your honour, I put it to you that members of the legal sector are guilty of gross negligence! 24% of UK legal firms have confessed to misplacing at least one mobile device containing confidential documents. These losses leave the data saved to the device vulnerable to exposure with case-notes, contracts and client details typically at risk. That’s the shocking discovery by Credant Technologies, a company specialising in IT security, in its survey amongst 100 legal firms across the UK to ascertain how this well-informed sector view “security, mobile devices and end-point protection”.
Source - International Business Times (press release)
[From the article:
37% of lawyers believed that if they did lose their mobile device it would be insecure as a hacker, or identity thief, is “cleverer than the average lawyer” and could access the data it contains. A paltry 13% of those that had lost a mobile device were confident it couldn’t be breached, or used against them, as only this small percentage of law firms were security savvy enough to encrypt the data residing on them.
... Over 90% of lawyers believe their data is protected because they are securing it with a password.
... The survey further revealed that one in five lawyers use their own mobile devices to store corporate and sensitive information – (a disclosure which will throw every respecting IT department into total apoplexy), as these devices slip under the companies IT security radar and out of the IT departments control so they can neither secure them, back-them-up or claim ownership of the information they contain if a lawyer were to leave the organisation.
What would prevent anyone from using a database for “purposes other than those for which it was created?” (Hint: Nothing, zip, nada)
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=2008102708134438
MI: Bloomfield Hills schools' release of info prompts privacy fears
Monday, October 27 2008 @ 08:13 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
Millions of parents in Michigan and nationwide are signed up to receive e-mail alerts from their schools. Most of the delivery systems were created in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks and were originally intended to quickly get word to parents about emergencies like lockdowns or evacuations.
.... But a controversy has erupted after about 12,000 parents in Bloomfield Hills schools received an e-mail earlier this month that was a campaign message for two school board candidates.
How did the candidates get the parents' e-mail addresses?
Bloomfield Hills school officials contend they were forced to release electronic copies of the e-mail address lists when two women made separate requests for the information last year under the state's Freedom of Information Act.
Source - Detroit Free Press
Points to laws and other interesting stuff... (I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but I'm too lazy to go back through my September blogs to be sure.)
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=2008102805022472
AU: 2007-08 Annual Report of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner
Tuesday, October 28 2008 @ 05:02 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
The Operation of the Privacy Act Annual Report 2007-08 from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Australia
The Operation of the Privacy Act Annual Report 2007-08 -PDF (5 MB)
“Big Brother-ness” seems to be a trend...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081027075833484
International Telecommunication Union criticised for its role in internet snooping
Monday, October 27 2008 @ 07:58 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
At EuroDIG, the first European Dialogue on Internet Governance, the scientists and experts of the Council of Europe have sharply criticised the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for acting behind closed doors in its initiatives towards cybersecurity standardization.
... Just recently, the ITU's work on standards for back-tracing IP addresses caused something of a furore. Yet, said Bill Drake, a scientist at the Center for International Governance at the Graduate School in Geneva, this work was only a tiny part of the work being done in the sensitive area of IT security. He warned that China, Russia and the USA could become the new axis of evil, pushing forward the integration of new ways of snooping on the internet. There was in his view an ambitious agenda extending beyond technical questions all the way up to legal regulations to counter cybercrime.
Source - Heise Online
e-Discovery
Sedona Provides New Much Needed Guidance on ESI Preservation
The Sedona Conference has once again written a helpful guide, this time on preservation and inaccessible data, entitled: Commentary on Preservation, Management and Identification of Sources of Information that are Not Reasonably Accessible. As usual, you can download a copy for individual use for free at The Sedona Conference’s website.
Related Perhaps a business that converts old/orphaned data to newer formats?
http://www.physorg.com/news144343006.html
'Digital dark age' may doom some data
The framed photograph will inevitably fade and yellow over time, but the digital photo file may be unreadable to future computers – an unintended consequence of our rapidly digitizing world that may ultimately lead to a "digital dark age," says Jerome P. McDonough, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
According to McDonough, the issue of a looming digital dark age originates from the mass of data spawned by our ever-growing information economy – at last count, 369 exabytes worth of data, including electronic records, tax files, e-mail, music and photos, for starters. (An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes; a quintillion is the number 1 followed by 18 zeroes.)
Geek stuff. A “home computer” that you carry on your keychain.
http://lifehacker.com/5069054/battle-of-the-thumb-drive-linux-systems
Battle of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems
These days, it only takes an increasingly-cheap USB thumb drive and a program like UNetbootin to create a portable Linux desktop you can run on any computer that can boot from a USB port. But check out the list of distributions UNetbootin can download and install—it's huge, and the names don't tell you much about which distro is best for on-the-go computing. Today we're detailing four no-install distributions—Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, and Fedora—and helping you decide which might work for that spare thumb drive you've got lying around, or as just a part of your multi-gig monster stick. Read on for a four-way faceoff of bootable Linux systems.
Interesting on many levels. Is this a marketing ploy, a political statement or a denial of service attack (servers are currently unreachable)
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/28/0354203&from=rss
Lame Duck Challenge Ends With Free Codeweavers Software For All
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday October 28, @07:30AM from the well-that-didn't-end-as-planned dept.
gzipped_tar writes to tell us that The Codeweavers "Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge" has ended in surprise and free software all day Tuesday (October 28, 2008) at the Codeweavers site. A while back Codeweavers gave President Bush a challenge to meet one of several goals before he left office. One of these goals was to lower gas prices in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon, which has since transpired.
"How was I to know that President Bush would take my challenge so seriously? And, give the man credit, I didn't think there was *any* way he could pull it off. But engineering a total market meltdown - wow - that was pure genius. I clearly underestimated the man. I'm ashamed that I goaded him into this and take full responsibility for the collapse of any savings you might have. Please accept our free software as my way of apologizing for the global calamity we now find ourselves embroiled in."
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