Another card processor (a la
Heartland?) or “merely” a poor local installation?
WI,
TN: Up to 40,000 credit and debit cards exposed in data breach
September 12, 2011 by admin
Credit and debit
cards used at Vacationland Vendors arcade games in Wisconsin Dells
may be affected by a data breach.
Vacationland
Vendors, Inc., a supplier of arcade equipment and vending machines to
businesses, announced Monday that up to 40,000 cards used at its
Wisconsin Dells and Sevierville, Tenn., arcades may have been
exposed, according to a business press release.
The
company discovered that a hacker gained unauthorized access to its
card processing systems at Wilderness Waterpark Resort in
the Dells and Wilderness at the Smokies in Sevierville , said Bill
Bray, spokesperson for the Wisconsin Dells-based Vacationland
Vendors.
[...]
The breach
occurred March 22, according to the release.
Read more on fdlreporter.com.
A statement
on Vacationland Vendors’ web site says:
An Important
Notice to our Customers
This notice
pertains to any customer who used a credit card or debit card at the
Wilderness Resorts in Wisconsin or Tennessee from
December 12, 2008 to May 25, 2011. In advance,
Vacationland Vendors apologies for any inconvenience that you may
experience from the circumstances described below.
Vacationland
Vendors recently discovered that an unauthorized person wrongfully
accessed certain parts of the point of sales systems that
Vacationland Vendors uses to process credit and debit transactions at
the Wilderness Resorts. Based upon its investigation to date,
Vacationland Vendors reasonably believes that a computer hacker
improperly acquired credit card and debit information. This
incident did not involve an internal security issue [Are they blaming
the card swipe machine? Bob] within the Wilderness
Resort. Vacationland Vendors has learned that other
businesses just like its’ own have been affected by this computer
hacker.
Vacationland
Vendors has moved swiftly to address this unfortunate incident and is
working with an outside consultant to ensure that its point of sale
systems are secure and protected from any further intrusions.
If you have used
your credit card or debit card at the Wilderness Resort locations
from December 12, 2008 through May 25, 2011, please consider taking
the following immediate steps in order to prevent the unauthorized
and unlawful use of your personal information:
[...]
I don’t see any explanation of why
they retained card numbers going back to December 2008.
Is this based on fear of the Privacy
Commissioner or failure to understand the law?
By Dissent,
September 13, 2011
I’ve often commented how entities
shield the names of rogue employees or contractors. Here’s a
letter
to an editor from Ann Cavoukian, Information Privacy Commissioner
for Ontario, about the paper’s coverage of an insider privacy
breach:
Your article
suggests the North Bay and District Hospital was unable to reveal to
patients the name of the nurse who had inappropriately accessed their
files. Why?
The reason given
was the privacy of the nurse. To be clear, in my orders under the
Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA) I have
consistently said that an individual whose health record has been
accessed by an unauthorized staff person has a right to know how the
organization has responded to the breach.
Privacy
considerations do not prevent the identity of the staff member
responsible for the breach being disclosed to the affected
individuals.
In this case,
there were most likely other reasons why the hospital chose not to
identify the responsible nurse, for example, their human resources
practices. However, privacy is not the problem – it does not
present a barrier to such disclosure.
Ann Cavoukian
Information
Privacy Commissioner
Update: The
paper now reports that the hospital will reveal the name – but
only to those who have received notification letters. [And
they (or their lawyers) will tell the press... Bob]
Time is money.
"A new transatlantic cable (the
first in 10 years) is going to be laid at the cost of $300M. The
reason? To shave
6ms off the time to transmit packets from London to New York.
The Hibernian Express will reduce the current transmission time —
roughly 65 milliseconds — by less than ten percent. However,
investors believe the financial community will be lining up to pay
premium rates to use the new cable. The
article suggests that a one-millisecond advantage could be worth
$100M per year to a large hedge fund."
(Related) Apparently, a lot of
articles start with “Facebook sucks”
Facebook
sucks up Americans' time
The folks at Nielsen have confirmed
what we've long suspected--we waste more time on Facebook than
anywhere else. The famed media metrics and ratings
company says in its latest social-media report that Americans
spend more time on Facebook than any other destination on the
Web--about 53 billion total minutes in the month of May 2011 alone.
Something I tell my students every
quarter...
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