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When the CISO asks to speak to you with that look on his face, you know the news isn't good. We were contacted by one of our third-party vendors, whom we had hired to do analysis on our website traffic. It appears that we have been passing sensitive information to them over the Internet. This sensitive information included data, such as customer names, addresses and credit card information. Because we are a public company, there are many regulatory guidelines that we have to follow like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the Payment Card Industry's (PCI) data security standard. Fortunately for us, our vendor has retained a copy of everything that we have sent to them. Unfortunately for us, it was six months of information totaling over a terabyte. Since our website is international, the legal department needed to obtain outside council to assist us in this matter. It will be a few days until I receive the data from the vendor.

All but one of the legal claims filed against Hannaford Bros. -- the Maine-based retailer that suffered a security breach exposing some four million credit and debit cards -- has been dismissed. U.S. District Court Judge Brock Hornby threw out the civil claims against the grocer for its alleged failure to protect card holder data and to notify customers of the breach in a timely fashion. In dismissing the claims, Hornby ruled that without any actual and substantial loss of money or property, consumers could not seek damages. The only complaint he allowed to stand was from a woman who said she had not been reimbursed by her bank for fraudulent charges on her bank account following the Hannaford breach.

Johns Hopkins is alerting more than 10,000 of its hospital patients that they may have been victims of identity theft. An investigation suggests a former employee who worked in patient registration may have been linked to a scheme to create fake drivers' licenses in Virginia, according to this letter from Baltimore-based Hopkins to the Maryland attorney general's office. Most of the patients are at very low risk, the letter says - they're included because the former employee accessed their records in the course of her work. But a few dozen have already been identified as likely victims, and a few hundred who have Virginia mailing addresses and whose records were accessed by the former employee may also be at risk. Hopkins is offering those patients credit monitoring, fraud resolution and identity-theft reimbursement for certain expenses.

Privacy & security are individual rights and responsibilities, not just corporate or governmental responsibilities. Reliance on technology is bound to fail without motivation for all involved to find mutual benefits.

Identity theft and security is always in the spotlight through the constant stream of news stories about companies losing confidential customer or client data, such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, health histories and so forth. These "breaking news" stories now seem to happen so frequently that we scarcely pay attention to them unless, of course, we are directly impacted by them. They have, however, heightened the public awareness and have even spawned new identity protection businesses. Information technology companies rightly react to this by developing new technologies to improve security and eagerly market these to CIOs as a way to protect the personal information of their customers and clients. While we should use these appropriately, we can't rely just on technology for identity protection. While some of these security incidents involve someone hacking into a system, many involve a human failing. Examples include a laptop with confidential information being lost or stolen and employees e-mailing sensitive data to their personal e-mail accounts so they can work on it from home.

When it comes to online privacy, we all appreciate the risk of publicizing juicy factoids such as incriminating photos or credit card numbers. But few of us realize a subtler threat: In abundance, innocuous, everyday data can divulge sensitive information as well. Some questions shouldn't be asked. Employers, for instance, generally are not allowed to discriminate based on marital status, sexual orientation and so on. But our growing digital footprint is threatening our ability to dodge inappropriate inquiries. Through data mining, employers, insurers, advertisers and others can infer the answers to private questions without even asking. They need two things: a heap of personal data, and the techniques to crunch it. Both are readily available. People generate and share more information than ever before. Besides consciously generated Web content such as blogs, Facebook profiles and YouTube videos, a steady stream of data is exchanged in the background. Companies track our searches, browsing and shopping behavior. Personal electronic devices can silently disclose our location while we post status updates and photos to the Web. All this seems innocent enough - and the more others do it, the safer we all feel. After all, what's one more Twitter update among millions?

Be careful what information you give to recruiters!

Insurance company Aetna has contacted 65,000 current and former employees whose Social Security numbers (SSNs) may have been compromised in a Web site data breach. The job application Web site also held names, phone numbers, e-mail and mailing addresses for up to 450,000 applicants, Aetna spokeswoman Cynthia Michener said. SSNs for those people were not stored on the site, which was maintained by an external vendor. The company found out about the breach earlier this month when people began receiving spam messages that appeared to come from Aetna and complained to the company, Michener said. The spam purported to be a response to a job inquiry and requested more personal information. The spam campaign showed the intruders successfully harvested e-mail addresses from the Web site, although Michener said it's not clear if SSNs were also obtained. Nonetheless, Aetna sent letters last week notifying the 65,000 people whose SSNs were on the site of the breach. The company is offering them one year of free credit monitoring, as SSNs are often used by identity thieves. "We wanted to err on the side of caution," Michener said. Aetna hired an IT forensics company to investigate how the Web site had been compromised. "At this point despite a thorough review, they've not been able to pinpoint the precise breach," Michener said. Aetna posted alerts on the job site, its main Web site and its internal intranet about the spam campaign, Michener said.

Heartland Payment Systems Inc. said it was experiencing losses this quarter as a direct result of a massive data breach it disclosed in January when investigators discovered a malicious program sniffing credit card data passing through its systems. The company said it took a $2.5 million loss for the quarter as a result of spending more than $12.6 million in legal bills, fines from MasterCard and Visa and administrative costs. The announcement was made during the company's financial earnings call, where Carr said the costs associated with the breach could continue to climb. "Our defense of the claims regarding the processing system intrusion remains ongoing," he said. "Much of the legal work remains to be done and it is difficult to anticipate when these matters will come to a conclusion." Carr also admitted for the first time that since the Princeton, N.J.-based processing giant announced a breach of its systems, some of the payment processor's clients have switched to competitors as a result of the breach. He said some competing processors resorted to scare tactics. "We have had many competitors that have been very supportive and professional, and we certainly don't want to tar all of our competitors with the same brush," Carr said. "We have had some competitors telling merchants falsely that they would be fined $10,000 a day if they stay with Heartland. We think we're through the worst of that." Car said less than $1 million of the breach costs were fines levied by MasterCard and Visa against the company's sponsored banks. The fines are being contested, he said. More than $500,000 relates to a fine assessed by MasterCard against the sponsored banks in which the card company said Heartland failed to take appropriate action upon learning that a breach was suspected. Carr said the fine is in direct violation of both the MasterCard rules and law.

A security breach at credit card processor and payroll services administrator Heartland Payment Systems Inc. has proven costly, driving the company to a first-quarter loss. The nation's sixth-largest payment processor reported a loss of $2.5 million, or 6 cents a share, compared with a profit of $9 million, or 23 cents a share, the year before. The results included expenses and accruals of $12.6 million, or 20 cents a share, resulting from a security breach in which criminals secretly installed spying software on its computer network.

Names, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers: information Daron Breinholt did not go looking for, but found Thursday morning. He took out the trash from the shoe distribution center, where he works, in the warehouse section on Salt Lake's west side. "I was just throwing away some stuff (in a dumpster) , and it was chock full of medical records," said Breinholt. "There's everything in there from canceled checks to routing numbers. They could steal a lot identities. A lot of identities were in there." At least some of the records appeared to come from Mountain Medical Center, a chiropractic office that had been in the Murray area until some months ago. Dr. Randall Malin said through his lawyer that he did not throw away records. "It's news to him," said Attorney Robert Harrison. Salt Lake Police packed away perhaps twenty boxes of papers, and said they would protect the documents, as they dug into the matter. Surveillance video, which 2News has not been able to see, reportedly showed two people who drove up in a red pickup truck Wednesday afternoon, and unloaded the materials from a trailer.

A very heated reaction has followed the interview I conducted yesterday with Robert Carr, CEO of Heartland Payment Systems. One reader even said the resulting Q&A made his "blood boil." Why the outrage? Because Carr did something a lot of people find unacceptable. He threw someone else under the proverbial bus for his company's failure to keep customer credit and debit card numbers out of evil hands. Specifically, he thrust an angry finger at the QSAs who came in to inspect the security controls Heartland had in place to meet the requirements of PCI security. In the article, [Heartland CEO on Data Breach: QSAs Let Us Down] Carr said, "The audits done by our QSAs (Qualified Security Assessors) were of no value whatsoever. To the extent that they were telling us we were secure beforehand, that we were PCI compliant, was a major problem. The QSAs in our shop didn't even know this was a common attack vector being used against other companies. We learned that 300 other companies had been attacked by the same malware. I thought, 'You've got to be kidding me.' That people would know the exact attack vector and not tell major players in the industry is unthinkable to me. I still can't reconcile that." That one comment brought down the house, and not in a favorable way. "I just read Bill Brenner's interview with Heartland Payment Systems' CEO Bob Carr and truthfully, my blood is boiling," Mike Rothman, SVP of strategy at eIQnetworks and chief blogger at Security Incite wrote in a counterpoint piece CSOonline ran today. "Basically, he's throwing his QSA under the bus for the massive data breach that happened under his watch. Basically, because the QSA didn't find anything, therefore he should be off the hook. I say that's a load of crap."

LifeLock Inc., the identity-theft protection company that boasts 1.5 million customers, is embroiled in legal battles with critics who say its key service breaks the law and its advertising defrauds consumers. A federal judge has ruled that the Tempe-based company's practice of setting fraud alerts for consumers with the three main credit bureaus - a major part of its $10-a-month service - is illegal. LifeLock filed a motion challenging the decision. If the court sides with LifeLock's opponents, the decision could stunt the growth of one of the shining stars of Arizona's startup community, forcing the company to permanently alter its practices.

Consumers, who become victims of identity theft through access to public records, do not have a clue as to how they became a victim. They cannot know unless the fraudster who "legally accessed" the public information is caught and confesses that they used or sold the information for identity theft. Most often end users of stolen identities are caught, not the kingpins. Illegal immigrants who purchase identities on the street sometimes for hundreds of dollars do not know the source. * What can an identity thief do with a name and SSN? Here is a short list. * Make a fake Social Security Card (see image below) * Make a fake Medicare Card and get medical treatment and Medicare benefits * Use the fake Social Security Card to get a driver's license or passport * Get a job and government benefits. * Get credit and open new financial accounts * Get housing, utilities and phone service * Get insurance * Thieves use fake ID to elude law enforcement by pretending they are you.

For all the concern and uproar over online privacy, marketers and data companies have always known much more about consumers' offline lives, like income, credit score, home ownership, even what car they drive and whether they have a hunting license. Recently, some of these companies have started connecting this mountain of information to consumers' browsers.

It's not exactly what anyone might expect to find at a garbage dump in Ghana. Journalism students from the University of British Columbia discovered intact hard drives containing secret international security data and personal information at a digital dumping ground in Ghana, said their teacher, Peter Klein. Mr. Klein, a producer for the PBS television program Frontline and an Emmy Award winning journalist, said the drives included information about U.S. Homeland Security and Pentagon defence contracts as well as social security numbers, credit card numbers, and family photos. The dumps are frequented by criminal gangs in the country, he said. The findings are part of a project by Mr. Klein's graduate students investigating electronic waste, or e-waste. The team also travelled to Guiyu, China, and India, piecing together the afterlife of discarded computers, drives and parts. To find out if cyber criminals could get information stored on the computers, the students bought several hard drives from vendors near the Ghana dumps to test at home in Vancouver. One of the drives came from Northrop Grumman, a large U.S. military contractor. It contained "details about sensitive, multimillion-dollar U.S. government contracts" as well as contracts with the defence intelligence agency and NASA, according to a synopsis of the project on the PBS website.

Two credit-card payment processors are offering to cover merchants' fines and penalties in the event of a data breach. However, the two companies, Heartland Payment Systems and Mercury Payment Systems, have different requirements that must be met before a merchant would qualify for coverage. For Mercury, the retailer would have to prove it was Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard-compliant (PCI DSS) at the time of a breach. "This is an enticement program to get merchants involved in PCI compliance," Jim Mackay, Mercury's vice president of marketing, told SCMagazineUS.com Friday. "Though there are critics who say that PCI does not go far enough, at least it's a step in the right direction."

Many people are scaling back their summer vacation plans because of the current economic situation. Some are staying closer to home. Others may be taking shorter vacations. But it's important to remember that when you travel, your risk of exposure to fraud and identity theft may increase. It's a fact that people tend to let their guard down while on vacation. Criminals know this. Identity theft is often a crime of opportunity. Don't be a vacationer who presents a crook with that opportunity. Your personal information, credit and debit cards, driver's license, passport, and other personal information are the fraudster's target. A few minutes spent planning before you travel can help reduce the risk that a fraudster will ruin your vacation. Here are some tips to help you avoid any nasty surprises:

Being privacy saavy while on vacation - Priceless

Identity theft concerns are focused on the security and necessity of the collection process. Collecting personal information just because you can is unsafe. Organizations can reduce privacy risks by not collecting unnecessary personal info. Once the data gets into the data life cycle pipeline, the cost of managing and destroying it escalates. The Federal Trade Commission estimates that as many as 9 million people have their identities stolen every year. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, more than 200 million instances of data breaches have occurred since the beginning of 2005, and they show no signs of letting up. In the first quarter of 2008 alone, more than 85 million incidents were reported. The causes of data breaches run the gamut: Hackers get unencrypted, transmitted data and data at rest; laptops are stolen or lost; storage Relevant Products/Services devices are lost by third-party shipping companies; flash drives or PDAs are left lying around; Social Security numbers are accidentally printed on envelopes; or data is found on discarded computers. This article examines the organizational risks to CPAs and their clients or corporate employers of improperly managed data throughout the data life cycle. It also discusses best data management practices and proper procedures for responding to a data breach. Data breaches, whatever the cause, are costly. According to a study by the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach in 2007 was $6.3 million. The average cost to an organization per record compromised is about $197, which is typically spent on phone calls for customer notification, providing free credit monitoring, discounts on membership fees, or discounts on merchandise to make up for the security Relevant Products/Services breach. Some organizations also experience an increase in customer turnover. The organization typically spends additional money in data protection Relevant Products/Services enhancements. Companies sanctioned by

Internet scams, phishing, identity theft and other attacks that exploit your personal data are always a threat when you shop online, set up an email account, use a credit card, manage an online bank account or carry your Social Security card. There is hope, however, for fighting these threats, and you can start by taking back control of all of your personal data. The 50 tips and tools in this list will help you understand how these scams originate, how to protect yourself online and offline, and how to track down your personal data on the Internet. Web Privacy Protect yourself and your data online by choosing a secure Web browser, understanding the dos and don'ts of wireless security, and correctly managing passwords.

Privacy is a central element of the FTC's consumer protection mission. In recent years, advances in computer technology have made it possible for detailed information about people to be compiled and shared more easily and cheaply than ever. That has produced many benefits for society as a whole and individual consumers. For example, it is easier for law enforcement to track down criminals, for banks to prevent fraud, and for consumers to learn about new products and services, allowing them to make better-informed purchasing decisions. At the same time, as personal information becomes more accessible, each of us - companies, associations, government agencies, and consumers - must take precautions to protect against the misuse of our information. The Federal Trade Commission is educating consumers and businesses about the importance of personal information privacy, including the security of personal information. Under the FTC Act, the Commission guards against unfairness and deception by enforcing companies' privacy promises about how they collect, use and secure consumers' personal information. Under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the Commission has implemented rules concerning financial privacy notices and the administrative, technical and physical safeguarding of personal information, and it aggressively enforces against pretexting. The Commission also protects consumer privacy under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

Online crime is increasingly hitting small and mid-size companies in the U.S., draining those entities' bank accounts through fraudulent transfers. The problem has gotten so bad that a financial services group recently sent out a warning about the trend, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) issued an alert today. "In the past six months, financial institutions, security companies, the media and law enforcement agencies are all reporting a significant increase in funds transfer fraud involving the exploitation of valid banking credentials belonging to small and medium sized businesses," says a bulletin sent on Aug. 21 to member financial institutions by the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, (FS-ISAC). The FS-ISAC is part of the government-private industry umbrella working with the Department of Homeland Security and Treasury Department to share information about critical threats to the country's infrastructure. The member-only alert described the problem and told its members to implement many of the precautions and monitoring currently used to detect consumer bank and credit card fraud.