ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers - and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers - and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is expanding beyond its traditional fingerprint-focused collection practices to develop a new biometrics system that will include DNA records, 3-D facial imaging, palm prints and voice scans, blended to create what's known as "multi-modal biometrics." Slideshow: The changing face of biometrics How the Defense Department might institutionalize war-time biometrics "The FBI today is announcing a rapid DNA initiative," said Louis Grever, executive assistant director of the FBI's science and technology branch, during his keynote presentation at the Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa. The FBI plans to begin migrating from its IAFIS database, established in the mid-1990s to hold its vast fingerprint data, to a next-generation system that's expected to be in prototype early next year. This multi-modal NGI biometrics database system will hold DNA records and more.

Imagine this nightmare scenario: You've contracted with a vendor to enter personnel data into a new computer system. You give the vendor confidential data regarding your employees, including their Social Security numbers, addresses, names of dependents, health records and bank account routing numbers. Then the vendor notifies you that employee data was somehow stolen or lost. What do you do? It happens more often than anyone would like to admit. The Federal Trade Commission estimates that 9 million Americans have their identities stolen each year. More than 262 million records have been breached since January 2005

The website for the popular children's television show "Curious George" was compromised this week to serve malware to visitors, according to researchers at web security vendor Purewire. The site, which is run by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), was propagating malware from at least Monday until Thursday, Nidhi Shah, research scientist at Purewire, told SCMagazineUS.com on Friday. It is not clear how hackers were able to break into the site, but it is possible that they obtained the credentials to an FTP account or exploited an SQL injection vulnerability, Shah said.

Health IT industry leaders and privacy advocates are watching carefully to see how the federal government will enforce expanded health data breach notification rules set to take effect this week, Federal Computer Week reports. HHS' breach-notification rule, which applies to HIPAA-covered entities and business associates, is scheduled to take effect tomorrow. The Federal Trade Commission's companion rule, which applies to personal health record vendors and other non-HIPAA-covered entities, is scheduled to take effect Thursday. The federal economic stimulus package mandated the creation of both rules.

In this video, Andre Gold, vice president and CISO of MoneyGram International, will discuss the basics of disaster recovery and business continuity planning, and define several general terms associated with disaster recovery and business continuity planning to help organizations develop a more accurate understanding. The text transcript of Gold's comments is included below. Andre Gold: Over the past four to five years, I've spent a lot of time in disaster recovery and business continuity planning as part of my role as the chief risk officer as well as the CISO for a couple major organizations. During that time, in working with those firms, I've had a greater appreciation of disaster recovery and business continuity planning, and I've learned that although BCP and DR are very important to firms, when its actually time to execute upon those respected strategies, many firms fail, and they fail fundamentally because they lose sight of the core elements of disaster recovery and business continuity planning. And with that, it's those core elements that we will be discussing today.

Consumers face a greater risk of losing control of their data when doing business with smaller retailers, as many haven't made investments to comply with the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), according to a new survey. The survey, which covered 560 U.S. and multinational organizations, asked respondents a variety of questions about their investments and deployment of technology to comply with PCI DSS, which was introduced in 2005. It's an industry standard created by major credit card companies that's designed to protect customer payment data. The survey found that 55 percent of organizations only secured credit card information but not other data such as Social Security and driver's license numbers or bank account details. Also, only 28 percent of smaller companies between 501 to 1,000 employees comply with PCI DSS. That compares with more than 70 percent of large merchants with 75,000 or more employees that claimed they're compliant.

Personal profiles on Facebook and other social-networking sites are a trove of inappropriate and embarrassing photographs and discomfiting breaches of confidentiality. You might expect that from your friends and even some colleagues - but what about your doctor? A new survey of medical-school deans finds that unprofessional conduct on blogs and social-networking sites is common among medical students. Although med students fully understand patient-confidentiality laws and are indoctrinated in the high ethical standards to which their white-coated profession is held, many of them still use Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and other sites to depict and discuss lewd behavior and sexual misconduct, make discriminatory statements and discuss patient cases in violation of confidentiality laws, according to the survey, which was published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Of the 80 medical-school deans questioned, 60% reported incidents involving unprofessional postings and 13% admitted to incidents that violated patient privacy. Some offenses led to expulsion from school.

A privacy researcher is urging Netflix to cancel its next research contest, before it results in potentially millions of dollars in damages for invasion of its customers' privacy. "Netflix should cancel this new, irresponsible contest," Paul Ohm wrote in a blog affiliated with Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. On Monday, the company awarded $1 million to the winners of its first competition, aimed at developing technology to improve its ability to predict what movies its customers will like. Ohm worries the information the company is about to release as test data for the second contest isn't as anonymous as Netflix may think.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski will unveil in a speech on Monday new proposals that would force Internet providers to treat the flow of content equally, sources familiar with the speech said on Friday. The concept, referred to as net neutrality, pits open Internet companies like Google Inc against broadband service providers like AT&T Inc, Verizon Communications Inc, and Comcast Corp, which oppose new rules governing network management. Advocates of net neutrality say Internet service providers must be barred from blocking or slowing traffic based on content. Providers say the increasing volume of bandwidth-hogging services like video sharing requires active management of their networks and some argue that net neutrality could stifle innovation. "He is going to announce rulemaking," said one source familiar with his speech about broadband, to be delivered at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank. "The commission will have to codify into new regulations the principle of nondiscrimination." The FCC could formally propose the rules aimed at applying to wireless and landline platforms at an open meeting in October.

A rule requiring healthcare providers, health plans, and other entities covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to notify individuals of a breach of their unsecured protected health information will become effective September 23, 2009. The "breach notification" regulations implement provisions of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The new "breach notification" regulations apply to HIPAA-covered entities and their business associates. HIPAA covered-entities include health plans, healthcare clearinghouses, and healthcare providers. A business associate is a person or entity (such as a healthcare benefits broker) who, on behalf of the covered entity, performs a function involving the use or disclosure of individually identifiable health information.

The Federal Trade Commission is planning three public discussions, starting in December, devoted to technology and consumer privacy. According to the FTC, the roundtables will address topics such as social networking, cloud computing, online advertising and mobile marketing, the goal being "to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation." Behavioral advertising, in particular, has come under fire by privacy groups. Earlier this month, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union and other related organizations called for stronger rules limiting what kinds of personal information are collected by marketers and how long they can hold on them.

On Friday, Brunswick, Maine-based heating and hardware firm Downeast Energy & Building Supply sent a letter notifying at least 850 customers that the company had suffered a data breach. Downeast sent the notice after discovering that hackers had broken in and stolen more than $200,000 from the company's online bank account. The attack on Downeast Energy bears all the hallmarks of online thieves who have stolen millions from dozens of other businesses, schools and counties over the past several months. In every case, the thieves appeared more interested in quick cash than in pilfering their victims' customer databases. Nevertheless, the intrusions highlight an additional cost for victims of this type of crime: complying with state data breach notification laws. "This is something new to us, fortunately, but we have responsibilities under Maine statute to report these things to our customers and employees," said the company's president, John Peters, in an interview with Security Fix. At least 44 other states and the District of Columbia have similar data breach notification laws. Sometime prior to September, attackers planted keystroke logging malware on Downeast's computer systems, and stole the credentials the company uses to manage its bank accounts online. Then, on or around Sept. 2, the hackers used that access to initiate a series of sub-$10,000 money transfers out of the company's account to at least 20 individuals around the United States who had no prior business with Downeast Energy. This type of crime is impossible without the cooperation of so-called "money mules," willing or unwitting individuals typically hired via Internet job search Web sites to act as "local agents" or "financial agents" responsible for moving money on behalf of a generic-sounding international corporation, legal experts say.The mules are then instructed to withdraw the cash and wire it via Western Union or Moneygram to fraud gangs overseas, typically in Eastern Europe.

What companies do you trust to guard your privacy? According to a Wednesday study from the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe, eBay is the most trusted company for privacy, followed by Verizon and the U.S. Postal Service. Facebook, meanwhile, cracked the study's top ten for the first time. To reach its conclusions, Ponemon and TRUSTe first polled more than 6,000 adults on their "most trusted" brands. An expert review panel then compared those results against the companies' privacy statements, notices, to what levels they accessed account information, their cookie management, in- and out-of-network data sharing practices, and the availability of customer service staff. Of the top 10 companies, seven of them were technology-related. The entire list includes eBay, Verizon, the U.S. Postal Service, WebMD, IBM, Procter & Gamble, Nationwide, Intuit, Yahoo, and Facebook. "With the banking industry at the center of a national financial crisis, it's no surprise to see a loss of trust reflected in the rankings of even those top performers on this list," Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, said in a statement. "Meanwhile, the continued strong showing of e-businesses such as eBay, WebMD, Yahoo, and Facebook seems to demonstrate consumers' growing comfort with doing business online."

Goodwin Procter Experts Discuss Data Privacy and Security Best Practices at IAPP Privacy Academy BOSTON, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- According to a new survey conducted by Goodwin Procter LLP and the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), companies face three significant challenges - cost, time and number of vendors involved - in complying with new data security rules issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts earlier this year. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has issued rules, which take effect on March 1, 2010, that impose significant data security requirements on entities possessing personal information of state residents, including entities based outside Massachusetts. The intent of the rules is to protect sensitive data and safeguard the public's privacy.

The ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee told the chief executive of Heartland Payment Systems that she was "astonished" a breach the company's information system lasted for nearly 1½ years without being detected. At a panel hearing Monday on protecting industry against growing cyber threats, Sen. Susan Collins, R.-Maine, asked Heartland CEO Robert Carr to explain how this delay happened. Carr responded that a breach is usually detected when the processing payer is notified of fraudulent use of cards, and that didn't occur until the end of 2008. "Isn't there software in the systems to detect such a breach?" Collins asked.

Chase Bank has sent out data breach notification letters to an undisclosed number of customers after a computer tape with customers' personal information was reported missing from a third-party vendor's storage facility. Tom Kelly, spokesperson for New York-based Chase, the commercial/consumer banking arm of financial giant JPMorgan Chase, says the vendor -- which he would not name -- confirmed it received and maintained the tape, and that its offsite facility had been searched thoroughly after the tape disappeared. Kelly would not say if the data on the tape was encrypted, but says its data can be read only with special equipment and software. "We have no evidence to indicate any of the information has been viewed or used inappropriately," Kelly says. A local ABC News station in Louisville, KY first reported the missing data tape and the notification letters being sent in August. Kelly says the notification letters are being sent out in batches, but would not say how long the tape has been missing, nor what type of customers' information (credit or banking) was on the tape. The electronic files, according to the notification letter, may have included names, addresses and Social Security numbers, but did not include any banking or financial information. Affected customers are being offered a free one-year subscription to the bank's identity protection program, Kelly says. For more information on 2009 data breaches involving financial institutions, see this interactive timeline

A few weeks ago, I was very relieved to find out I had passed the IAPP exam to be a "Certified Information Privacy Professional" or CIPP. I got this certificate and even a pin, which is more than I ever got for passing the bar exams of New York and California. So what exactly did I need to know to become a CIPP? To be certified in corporate privacy law, you're expected to know what's covered in the CIPP Body of Knowledge, primarily major U.S. privacy laws and regulations and "the legal requirements for the responsible transfer of sensitive personal data to/from the United States, the European Union and other jurisdictions." You're also expected to pass the Certification Foundation, required for all three certifications offered by IAPP. That covers basic privacy law, both in the U.S. and abroad, information security principles and practices, and "online privacy," which includes an overview of the technologies used by online companies to collect information and the particular issues to be considered in this context. So what do you think? Should you be able to pass an all-objective, 180 question, three-hour exam (counting the CIPP and Certification Foundation exams together) on the above topics and be able to call yourself a "privacy professional"?

67% of French Organisations Hit By One or More Data Breach Incidents Within Last Twelve Months Research from Ponemon Institute Reveals that only 9 Percent of Respondents have an Overall Encryption Plan or Strategy Applied Consistently across the Enterprise PARIS and MENLO PARK, Calif., Sept. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- PGP Corporation, a global leader in enterprise data protection, has announced the results of its inaugural annual study by The Ponemon Institute, identifying the steps French organisations are taking in order to safeguard their confidential data. The 2009 Annual Study: France Enterprise Encryption Trends study, which polled 414 IT security professionals at enterprises and public sector organisations, found that 67 percent of French organisations have been hit by at least one data breach incident within the last year, with 18 percent having been hit by more than five incidents. A massive 92 percent of the data breaches were never disclosed as there was no legal or regulatory requirement to do so. Despite the large number of data breach incidents, 71 percent responded that data protection was a 'very important' or 'important' part of their risk management strategy, with protecting sensitive or confidential information in motion (transfer) or at rest (storage) their top priority.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama warned American teenagers on Tuesday of the dangers of putting too much personal information on Internet social networking sites, saying it could come back to haunt them in later life.