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"Scott Fortnum had put in almost a full day of work at his Markham, Ont., office when he decided to "check in" on Foursquare, a location-based social network where users log the names and co-ordinates of the places they visit with a time stamp. The 44-year-old's check-in was marked with a small coral balloon on an embedded Google Map and instantly viewable by the 12 friends he lists on Foursquare - and millions of others. His check-in found its way onto pleaserobme.com, a recently launched website with a mischievous mandate: "listing all those empty homes out there." With March break approaching, many impending vacationers are installing automatic timers on their lights and putting their newspaper subscriptions on hold to deter burglars. Many are also posting on Twitter about when they're leaving and touting their week-long getaway to Jamaica on Facebook - unwittingly letting the online world know exactly when they're away. Mr. Fortnum's check-in appeared this way on Please Rob Me: @sfortnum left home and checked in 30 minutes ago: I'm at ALS Canada (3000 Steeles Ave. E. #200, DVP & Steeles, Toronto.) http://4sq.com/4MmX51 Many Foursquare users such as Mr. Fortnum cross-post their check-ins to Twitter, where they are easy to find through the search function. With some simple coding, Please Rob Me's creators are able to collect those millions of public tweets on their site in real time, highlighting one of the many security concerns that springs from broadcasting one's whereabouts online. Frank Groeneveld, one of the three students from the Netherlands who designed Please Rob Me, says he co-created the site to give members of social networks a wake-up call."

Finally a site that might make someone a profit!

Difficult economic times can be the breeding ground for increased fraudulent activities. In July 2009, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (www.fincen.gov) published its 12th edition of The SAR Activity Review - By the Numbers. SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) are one key aspect of FinCEN's efforts related to its responsibility for regulatory administration of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970. Many different financial industries such as banks, credit unions, insurance companies, check-cashing services, broker/dealers, and casinos are required to complete and file SARs. According to FinCEN's press release on the SAR Activity Review, "The report reveals that of the 20 different violation types tracked, seven of the categories relate specifically to fraud and all seven showed an increase in SAR filings during the year. While these categories represent one-third of the possible violation types, they accounted for nearly half of the increase in total SAR filings from 2007 to 2008, with all of the fraud categories seeing double-digit increases in percentage of filings in 2008. These categories are: check fraud, mortgage loan fraud, consumer loan fraud, wire transfer fraud, commercial loan fraud, credit card fraud, and debit card fraud." Could any of this apply to you? Are your control and monitoring processes able to identify these examples of common patterns of suspicious activity that FinCEN has identified?

Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke was among hundreds of victims of an identity fraud ring that stole more than $2.1 million from consumers and financial institutions across the United States, Newsweek magazine reported on its website. The head of the U.S. central bank and his wife were swept up in a case against the ring after her purse, with personal checks inside, was snatched at a coffee shop in August 2008, Newsweek reported, citing recently filed court documents. Someone soon began cashing checks on the Bernanke family bank account, a crime that became part of a wide-ranging federal identity theft investigation that was already underway.

New Englanders have a reputation for being taciturn, but when it comes to data Massachusetts takes the cake. No state loves its privacy more than the Bay State, which last year passed the nation's most exacting data privacy law, requiring companies to check off a honey-do list of steps designed to protect personal data belonging to commonwealth residents. Connecticut and Rhode Island preceded Massachusetts in joining the minority of states that have enacted proactive data privacy laws, requiring businesses to protect information like Social Security and credit card numbers. Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, like nearly all states, have only reactive data laws, requiring companies to take certain steps - like reporting a breach to authorities - after data has been compromised. Rhode Island's law, passed in 2006, requires businesses that own or license Rhode Islanders' personal information to "provide reasonable security" for that data. Connecticut's law, passed shortly before Massachusetts enacted data privacy legislation last summer, requires businesses to create and publicly display a data protection policy, but does not specify what that policy should entail. The Connecticut and Rhode Island laws stop far short of the controversial requirements in Massachusetts, where new regulations are scheduled to take effect by January 2010. "They're not technically one-liners, but they're very general," Goodwin Procter LLP partner David Goldstone said of the Connecticut and Rhode Island statutes, which are similar to laws passed in Texas and California. "Essentially they say companies have to have reasonable protections in place."

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"Fomer UCLA Healthcare System researcher Huping Zhou has pleaded guilty to violating parts of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and could be one of the first people in the country convicted under the law, federal authorities announced Friday. After learning he was to be let go, the 48-year-old is alleged to have accessed the UCLA patient records system 323 times during the three-week period, mostly to check out the files of celebrities, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. The names of the targeted stars have not been revealed. Federal authorities say Zhou admitted to accessing the records -- cruising files that were not necessary to view as part of his job -- under a plea agreement. He'll face a judge for sentencing March 22. It's not clear what kind of punishment the U.S. Attorney's Office will recommend in exchange for his cooperation."

"With a lot of prodding from the Federal Trade Commission, the Internet advertising industry has committed to telling Web site users about how they collect and use data to customize the ads they display. And it has agreed to find a more prominent and clear way to do this than the cryptic privacy policies you can find if you click a tiny link at the bottom of many Web pages. But how do you communicate something very complex in a way that is clear but doesn't bog down people who just want to check the latest sports scores?"

"A UN watchdog has called for a new international agreement on privacy following a review of the expanding global array of surveillance measures and databases advanced by governments in the cause of counter-terrorism. The special rapporteur on human rights, Martin Scheinin, said the UN should create a "a global declaration on data protection and data privacy" in response. His report, delivered to the UN's Human Rights Council, describes the expansion of watchlists, border checks, financial data sharing, interception of communications, biometrics and ID registers in recent years. "States no longer limit exceptional surveillance schemes to combating terrorism and instead make these surveillance powers available for all purposes," he added."

"Whether a patient comes in for a gall-bladder operation or to have a baby, the routine remains the same for staff at Sharp HealthCare hospitals in San Diego. The front desk checks insurance records to make sure the bills get paid on time. Nurses take vitals and tag their charges with a bar-coded wristband. And behind the scenes, fund-raisers scan the assets of each patient -- to find out whether they're "megarich," "wealthy" or merely "comfortable.""

Is that a microscope following me around? Must get more tin foil to keep them from seeing my thoughts.

"A simple search query has exposed Google Voice mail messages (audio and transcript) for anyone to see and hear. As first reported here, a user entering "site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/*" into the Google search bar discovered random voice mail messages belonging to random Google Voice accounts (see screenshot below). Clicking on each revealed not only the audio file and transcript of the call, but it also listed the callers name and phone number as it would if you were checking your own Google Voice voice mail. I was able to replicate the issue and listen to several voice mail messages, including some legitimate ones with potentially sensitive information."

Parents of 18,541 Metro Nashville students will receive letters next week outlining a security breach that put their children's Social Security numbers online for three months. Advertisement Boston-based Public Consulting Group Inc., which holds a five-year, $2.6-million-a-year contract with the state to collect student data from various districts, corrected the error March 31 after a parent using Google to search her daughter's name found it - along with personal data for the students and 6,000 parent names. Art Staehling learned Wednesday that his teenage daughter was on the list and said he's concerned what could happen to her identity. "I find it hard to believe that an established company had a problem of this magnitude," Staehling said. The consulting group will pay for parents of affected children to check all family members' credit reports through Experian and for a year of monitoring. One of the group's owners, Stephen Skinner, said the error happened when workers running a test Dec. 28 on random student data inadvertently stored a file to an insecure directory. They discovered the error March 5 and took down the file, which contained student names, gender, race or ethnicity, date of birth, Social Security number and, in some cases, parent names. But they were unaware Google's search engine had already found the file and indexed it. That's how the parent, who is also a Metro schools employee, found out about the breach weeks later. Public Consulting Group worked with Google to take the information down.

Cash-squeezed privately held companies are facing another threat in this struggling economy: rising employee fraud. Employee fraud -- from check-forgery schemes to petty-cash theft -- tends to rise during tough economic times, when workers are feeling financial pressure in their personal lives, experts say. And small companies are especially vulnerable because they often lack stringent internal controls to prevent fraud. Sometimes, managers at affected companies attribute lost funds to lower sales -- never even suspecting foul play.

Financial fraud last year caused 7.5 percent of all adults in the United States to lose money, largely because of data breaches. That's the finding of a survey conducted by Stamford, Conn. research firm Gartner. The survey polled 5,000 U.S. adults and also found that when compared with average consumers, nearly twice as many people who lost money to fraud changed their shopping, payment, and e-commerce behavior. In particular, victims of electronic checking and/or savings account transfer fraud were nearly five times more likely to change banks because of security concerns. "Fraud victims are also more cautious about which brick-and-mortar stores they shop at and how they pay for goods when they get there, demonstrating more awareness of the risk of data breaches," said Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, in a news release. High-tech crimes, such as data breaches (which typically involve hacking into enterprise systems) and phishing attacks against consumers, are the most prevalent causes of payment card fraud. Gartner found that financial losses were highest with new-account, credit card and brokerage fraud, with average losses per incident totaling $1,097, $929 and $900, respectively. However, victims of brokerage, credit card and debit/ATM card fraud find it easiest to recover their losses, receiving an average of 100 percent, 86 percent, and 77 percent of the funds stolen, respectively.

The recent U.S. stimulus bill includes $18 billion to catapult the health industry toward the world of electronic health records. This is sure to light a fire under every hungry security vendor to position itself as the essential product or service necessary to achieve HIPAA compliance. It should also motivate healthcare IT professionals to learn where their sensitive data is located and how it flows. To be sure, with federal money allocated through 2014 for the task of modernizing the healthcare industry there will be many consultant and vendor businesses that will thrive on stimulus money. Healthcare is unique in that storage of electronic health records is highly distributed between primary care physicians, specialist doctors, hospitals, and insurance/HMO organizations. Information has to be efficiently shared among these entities with great sensitivity towards patient privacy and legitimate claims processing. Patients want to prevent over zealous employers from performing unauthorized background checks on medical history; claim processors want to prevent paying fraudulent claims arising from targeted patient identity theft. The bill has two provisions which turn this into a tremendously challenging plan, and a daunting task for securing patient data: * Citizens will have the right to monitor and control use of their own health data. This implies a large centralized identity and access control service, or perhaps a federated network of patient registration directories. Authenticated users will be able to reach into the network of health databases audit use of their data and payment history. * Health organizations suffering loss of more than 500 patient records must publicly disclose the breach, starting with postings on the government's Health and Human Services website. This allows related organizations to trace the impact of the breach throughout the healthcare network, but care must be taken not to disclose vulnerabilities in the system to intruders

Social media is on the rise, and so are the privacy and security risks. Is it time to dial back on the whole Web 2.0 'friend' thing? The social media honeymoon is officially over. While it may not yet be time to fly to Reno for a quickie divorce, you might want to start thinking about sleeping in separate bedrooms for a while. Example du jour: Over the weekend, a rogue application spread across Facebook, warning users about bogus errors in their profiles. Clicking on the "Error Check System" app causes it to send false warnings to your entire FB posse, per the unofficial AllFacebook blog. There doesn't seem to be any payload associated with that app besides driving traffic, but the potential for abuse is obvious. But a bigger problem on social nets is an old familiar one: spam. So far, spam only accounts for about 5 to 25 percent of all e-mail passed on social networks, versus 90 percent of regular e-mail, says Adam O'Donnell, director of emerging tech for Cloudmark, which filters spam for some large social nets (but won't identify which ones). As more people start tweeting about what their cats ate for lunch and share their Facebook profiles with near-total strangers, though, that number will only grow. The type of spam on social networks is different too, says O'Donnell. Think fewer fake Viagra come-ons, more social engineering scams. In other words, the junk you get on social networks is more likely to be aimed at stealing your credentials or your identity -- and thus much more dangerous than garden-variety spam.

Monster.com is advising its users to change their passwords after data including e-mail addresses, names and phone numbers were stolen from its database. The break-in comes just as the swelling ranks of the unemployed are turning to sites like Monster.com to look for work. The company disclosed on its Web site that it recently learned its database had been illegally accessed. Monster.com user IDs and passwords were stolen, along with names, e-mail addresses, birth dates, gender, ethnicity, and in some cases, users' states of residence. The information does not include Social Security numbers, which Monster.com said it doesn't collect, or resumes. Monster.com posted the warning about the breach on Friday morning and does not plan to send e-mails to users about the issue, said Nikki Richardson, a Monster.com spokeswoman. The SANS Internet Storm Center also posted a note about the break-in on Friday. USAJobs.com, the U.S. government Web site for federal jobs, is hosted by Monster.com and was also subject to the data theft. USAJobs.com also posted a warning about the breach. Monster.com has been checking for misuse of the stolen information but hasn't yet found any, it said. It has made changes since discovering the break-in but won't discuss them because it doesn't discuss security procedures publicly and because it is still investigating the incident, Richardson said. She also would not disclose the volume of data stolen, but said the company decided it would be prudent to alert all of its users via its Web site.

A Port Washington medical practice was defrauded of nearly $250,000 by a former employee who for four years paid her credit card bills with automatic debits from a doctor's checking account, Nassau police said. Debra Camilo, 42, of 110 Malba Dr., Whitestone, began the transfers in the spring of 2004 and even though she was fired a year later -- for reasons unrelated to the fraud -- she continued until July 2008, police said. All told, the former office manager made more than 80 unauthorized debit transfers to her Visa credit card amounting to $241,341, police said. Crimes against property bureau detectives arrested Camilo Thursday afternoon in Manhasset and charged her with grand larceny, identity theft and fraud. She was scheduled for arraignment Friday in First District Court, Hempstead.

For the second time in the same case, law enforcement in Denver turned away a key component in hundreds of instances of identity theft. The first time, it was a box full of stolen documents found in a storage unit, turned away by a Denver Police officer. This time, it was the main suspect, turned away by the Denver Sheriff's Department. The Denver Sheriff's Department admits the man believed to be at the center of an identity theft operation, 46-year-old Paul Simmons, tried to turn himself in at the Denver City Jail 16 hours before police arrested him. A warrant had been issued for his arrest and was entered into the system at 10:15 a.m, according to Sonny Jackson, Denver Police Spokesman. Sheriff's spokesperson Capt. Frank Gale told 9Wants to Know Tuesday that Simmons walked into the Denver City Jail around 8 p.m. Monday night. The Denver Sheriff's Department runs the city jail. It is not staffed by the Denver Police Department. Gale says Simmons told a sheriff's deputy he had received a call from an investigator with Denver Police saying he was wanted for questioning in connection with the identity theft case featured on 9NEWS. Gale says the sheriff's deputy then told Simmons there was not a record of him being wanted in the computer, but sent Simmons to check in with the Denver Police Department housed in a separate building across the courtyard at 1331 Cherokee St. Gale said the deputy did not know if Simmons ever made it to the Denver Police building. Denver Police spokesperson Sonny Jackson said Simmons never did. "We really wish he would have taken the 50 steps across the courtyard and talked to us, that would have saved us a lot of time today." Jackson said. "If he [Simmons] really wanted to turn himself in we would have been more than happy to take him into custody."

It is hard work looking for a job, Matt Sawyer said. "Well with the economy being down right now, it's pretty hard," said Sawyer. Like most job hunters, Matt is posting his resume on various online job sites. But you have to be careful when sending out your personal information over the Internet, privacy expert Pam Dixon said. "The problem is, if you don't use it correctly, it can come back to haunt you," she said. Dixon runs the World Privacy Forum and warns job hunters to be cautious with their personal information when posting their resume. "In fact any competent job site will give you the option of hiding your personal information," said Dixon. Scam artists have been known to steal personal information from resumes and use it to apply for credit. That is why Dixon said you should only include your first initial and last name, no full names, when writing your resume. She also said not to include your phone number or address. Dixon said you should create an email address that is temporary and just use it for your job search. Dixon said scam artist will even call people from their resume and ask for detailed information like a copy of their driver's license or social security number or even their credit card information. The scammers will claim it's for a background check but it's only to steal from the job seeker. Matt admits if he was approached for a job he might give away too much information. "I think when people first get that call and they're real excited about it, they might just jump into it and go ahead and do it," he said.