http://www.databreaches.net/?p=7778
Losses from EFTPOS frauds at Perth shops hit $450,000
October 10, 2009 by admin Filed under Breach Incidents, Breach Types, Business Sector, ID Theft, Non-U.S., Skimmers
McDonald’s Australia is alerting customers to a huge skimming operation in Perth. As of yesterday, they had reported that about 2500 accounts had been compromised to the tune of $450,000 but today they say that they cannot guarantee that more West Australians will not be fleeced in the fraud scam.
While police have so far refused to detail exactly how the fraud was happening, it is understood McDonald’s is the only store to have been targeted.
PerthNow understands that the sophisticated scam has netted hundreds of victims and more than $750,000 has been siphoned from bank accounts.
Read more in Perth Now.
[From the report:
Police, who said yesterday that about 2500 accounts had been compromised, today said 1400 of those had been confirmed defrauded.
"It is estimated that the value of this is around $450,000," police spokeswoman Ros Weatherall said.
That was three times the $150,000 loss figure estimated yesterday.
… Several PerthNow readers have revealed in comments on related stories that their accounts had been debited up to thousands of dollars in a series of transactions for increasing amounts.
[From Perth Now:
PerthNow understands that the sophisticated scam has netted hundreds of victims and more than $750,000 has been siphoned from bank accounts.
An interesting outcome of poor security? The intersection of Identity Theft and stalking? If the bank continues to refuse to follow its own policy, what are the consequences?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=4477
Bank customer’s privacy anger
October 10, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Breaches, Non-U.S.
David Nankervis reports:
Banking giant ANZ has admitted a branch manager breached privacy regulations to access a customer’s personal information.
But the woman whose private details were “inappropriately” viewed by the manager – who is also her next door neighbour – is demanding the man be sacked according to the bank’s own code of conduct regulations.
At the very least, Golden Grove resident Susan Clayton wants ANZ manager Phillip Saredakis transferred from her local Golden Grove branch.
[...]
The couple took their complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service, which said in May they were entitled to compensation for the “distress” caused by the bank – but it could not force ANZ to sack Mr Saredakis.
The couple accepted $5000 in compensation but are still demanding Mr Saredakis lose his job.
Watchdog group Consumers SA agrees, saying the privacy breach should also be investigated by police.
Read more on Adelaide Now.
Security. If I was still a professional paranoid, I'd take this to mean that the DHS can't secure their data. Silly me.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/spies-protest-after-after-intel-sharing-tools-shut-down/
Spies Protest After Intel-Sharing Tools Shut Down
By Michael Tanji October 9, 2009 12:55 pm
… uGov, an e-mail platform that could be used by analysts throughout the intelligence community, was “one of its earliest efforts at cross-agency collaboration,” Marc Ambinder over at The Atlantic notes. uGov “will be shut down because of security concerns, government officials said.”
[This] follows reports that another popular analytic platform called “Bridge,” which allows analysts with security clearances to collaborate with people outside the government who have relevant expertise but no clearances, is being killed.
Security: Backup your phone recently?
Server Failure Destroys Sidekick Users' Backup Data
Posted by timothy on Sunday October 11, @05:29AM from the oh-well-enough-said dept.
Expanding on the T-Mobile data loss mentioned in an update to an earlier story, reader stigmato writes
"T-Mobile's popular Sidekick brand of devices and their users are facing a data loss crisis. According to the T-Mobile community forums, Microsoft/Danger has suffered a catastrophic server failure that has resulted in the loss of all personal data not stored on the phones. They are advising users not to turn off their phones, reset them or let the batteries die in them for fear of losing what data remains on the devices. Microsoft/Danger has stated that they cannot recover the data but are still trying. Already people are clamoring for a lawsuit. Should we continue to trust cloud computing content providers with our personal information? Perhaps they should have used ZFS or btrfs for their servers."
(Related) Failures do not stop users from trusting the Cloud. Or maybe it's the legal environment they prefer...
Warez Moving From BitTorrent to Conventional Hosting Services
Posted by timothy on Saturday October 10, @11:31PM from the gradual-process-gets-noticed dept.
ericatcw writes
"Driven by increased crackdowns on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, software pirates are fast moving their warez to file-hosting Web sites like RapidShare, reports Computerworld. According to anti-piracy vendor V.I. Labs, 100% of the warez in its survey were available on RapidShare, which, according to Alexa, is already one of the 20 largest sites in the world. V.I. Labs' CEO predicts file-hosting sites such as RapidShare will supplant BitTorrent, as the former appear better protected legally."
Business Strategy: Let's see if as many users will pay for our content as will read it for free. And how will we attract new readers?
Economist.com to start charging fee for Reading News Online
On 10.10.09, In Uncategorized, by bhupendra
Leading Economic Magazine ‘The Economist‘ team has decided to charge for its online news readers starting October 13th.
[Apparently online access will be limited to the last 90 days and the Contents page will be for subscribers only Bob]
(Related) Strong indications that this is part of contract renegotiation. (Shutting out Google is trivial, as the article points out.) Perhaps Google should counter with a “Rupert-Free Day” – let the provider see what part Google plays in sending traffic to their sites? We'd really see some lawsuits then!
Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content
Posted by timothy on Saturday October 10, @08:22PM from the what-part-of-come-in-don't-you-understand? dept.
Hugh Pickens writes
Weston Kosova writes in Newsweek that Rupert Murdoch gave an impassioned speech to media executives in Beijing decrying that search engines — in particular Google — are stealing from him, because Google links to his stories but doesn't pay News Corp. to do so. [Is this the online equivalent of saying, “Did you read that article about the Rockies?” as I hand you the paper? Bob] 'The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,' Murdoch says. 'But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.' But if Murdoch really thinks Google is stealing from him, and if he really wants Google to stop driving all those readers to his Web sites at no charge, he can simply stop Google from linking to their news stories by going to his Web site's robot.txt file and adding 'Disallow.'"
Business strategy: Clearest indication yet that Apple will open the iPhone to other carriers. (The alternative would be to buy them, but I doubt Apple would bother) Time to short AT&T?
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/10/10/1628210
Why AT&T Should Dump the iPhone's Unlimited Data Plan
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 10, @01:40PM from the traffic-shaping-on-the-go dept.
Pickens writes
"Farhad Manjoo has a provocative story at Slate asserting that while the iPhone has prompted millions of people to join AT&T, it has also hurt the company's image because all of those customers use their phones too much, [The customers would disagree. Bob] and AT&T's network is getting crushed by the demand. [They weren't ready and couldn't adapt. Bob] The typical smartphone customer consumes about 40 to 80 megabytes of wireless capacity a month, while the typical iPhone customer uses 400 MB a month. As more people sign up, local cell towers get more congested, and your own phone performs worse. He says the problem is that a customer who uses 1 MB a month pays the same amount as someone who uses 1,000 MB, and the solution is tiered pricing. [Making the system work as advertised never enters their minds. Bob] 'Of course, users would cry bloody murder at first,' [“But we'd soon eliminate the whiners...” Bob] writes Manjoo. 'I'd call on AT&T to create automatic tiers — everyone would start out on the $10/100 MB plan each month, and your price would go up automatically as your usage passes each 100 MB tier.' He says the key to implementing the policy is transparency, and that the iPhone should have an indicator like the battery bar that changes color as you pass each monthly tier. 'Some iPhone fans will argue that metered pricing would kill the magic of Apple's phone — that sense of liberation one feels at being able to access the Internet from anywhere, at any time. The trouble is, for many of us, AT&T's overcrowded network has already killed that sense, and now our usual dealings with Apple's phone are tinged with annoyance.'" [i.e. Customers are ready to leave AT&T Bob]
We love our employees so much, we're willing to treat them like our children. (No Christian Scientists need apply.)
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/022534.html
October 10, 2009
Mandatory Flu Shots for New York Health Care Workers
Time: "...The notices are there to remind the hospital's staff — which includes everyone from the doctors and nurses who care for patients to the administrative, housekeeping and food-service personnel — that every employee must be vaccinated against both seasonal and H1N1 flu or face possible termination. The mandate comes from the health department of New York, which over the summer became the first state to require that all health-care workers be vaccinated against influenza. In other states, individual hospitals have taken the same aggressive position. Given that the pandemic H1N1 strain is circulating the globe — and that one of the seasonal-flu strains is resistant to Tamiflu, a commonly used antiviral treatment — such a policy seems logical. But is it legal?"
Amusing. Perhaps you could use this for a treasure hunt? (Or to interpret the log of the Beagle?)
Get Lat Lon
Find the latitude and longitude of a point on a map.
For my Hacking students. With that information you captured, you can pretend to be the RIAA and extort money from your friends!
http://torrentfreak.com/illegal-downloads-150x-more-profitable-than-legal-sales-091009/
Illegal Downloads 150x More Profitable Than Legal Sales
Written by Ernesto on October 09, 2009
Unlike most people might think, piracy is not necessarily a bad thing for copyright holders. In fact, German pirate-tracking outfit DigiRights Solutions shows that copyright holders can earn 150 times more money from illicit downloads than from iTunes and other legal stores.
… The German-based anti-piracy outfit DigiRights Solutions (DRS) recently published an interesting PowerPoint presentation (in German) which shows how copyright holders can make millions from pirates. The document reveals some rather shocking statistics that show how illicit downloads are more profitable than legal downloads.
… DRS says it generally sends out emails to alleged file-sharers requesting them to pay €450 (650$) per offense. According to the company they get to keep 80% of the money, leaving 20% for the copyright holders.
… However, not everyone who receives a letter will pay up, but DRS says that an impressive 25% of all recipients do without asking questions. This figure is much higher than most people assumed previously.
… DRS states that it’s realistic to track and pursue about 5,000 filesharers per month per title. Considering that 25% of those people pay the €90, then the copyright holders would have to to make about 150,000 online sales. Which is equal to the number of sales that are required for a Gold record award in Germany.
Global Warming! Global Warming! A certain law professor asks my Statistics students to calculate the probability that Al Gore is responsible for the new Ice Age, postponement of the Rockies game and the earliest start to the ski season in 40 years. I smell a lawsuit coming!
http://cbs4denver.com/local/weather.denver.colorado.2.742188.html
Oct 10, 2009 7:03 pm US/Mountain
Season's First Arctic Blast Delivers Record Cold
DENVER (CBS4) ―
The temperature on Saturday morning bottomed out at 17 degrees -- a new record low for Denver.
The old record was 25 degrees set back in 1905! Sunday morning should deliver another record low for Denver.
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