It’s unpleasant to find out that someone stole your credit card numbers, but it’s even worse when a collection agency begins harassing you over debt you didn’t create. CreditCards.com has assembled sample letters and a step-by-step guide to help identity theft victims clear their names and protect their credit.
Source: CreditCards.com
Student Files Are Exposed on Web Site
The Princeton Review, the test-preparatory firm, accidentally published the personal data and standardized test scores of tens of thousands of Florida students on its Web site, where they were available for seven weeks.
A flaw in configuring the site allowed anyone to type in a relatively simple Web address and have unfettered access to hundreds of files on the company’s computer network, including educational materials and internal communications.
Another test-preparatory company said it stumbled on the files while doing competitive research. This company provided The New York Times with the Web address of the internal files on the condition that it not be named. The Times informed the Princeton Review of the problem on Monday, and the company promptly shut off access to that portion of its site.
Source: Gainesville.com
The Library of Congress has added new famed authors to the award-wining lineup for the 2008 National Book Festival. Free downloadable podcasts, available on iTunes and the Library’s Web site, as well as other interactive features, bring the magic of the National Book Festival to booklovers nationwide.
If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?
WANT to vet a baby sitter? Need to peek into the background of a prospective employee? Curious about the past of a potential date?
Last month, PeopleFinders, a 20-year-old company based in Sacramento, introduced CriminalSearches.com, a free service to satisfy those common impulses. The site, which is supported by ads, lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States. In the process, it just might upset a sensitive social balance once preserved by the difficulty of obtaining public documents like criminal records.
Source: New York Times
See also: Is ChoicePoint a Model of Restraint in Releasing Criminal Records?
From the article:
The FBI removed computer records from the C. Burr Artz Library this week, a library official confirmed Saturday.
Darrell Batson, director of Frederick County Public Libraries, said two FBI employees came to the downtown Frederick library either Wednesday or Thursday. The agents removed two public computers from the library’s second floor. They told him they were taking the units back to their office in Washington, D.C., Batson said.
Source: WTOP News (via Slashdot)
IRS employee pleads guilty to improperly accessing accounts of 200 celebrities
An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employee based out of Covington, 56-year-old John Snyder, pleaded guilty today to a misdemeanor charge of exceeding unauthorized computer access to obtain information from the Internal Revenue Service. Snyder admitted today that he improperly accessed the accounts of nearly 200 celebrities including former Cincinnati Reds players and Cincinnati Bengals Head Coach Marvin Lewis.
A criminal complaint was filed against Snyder in May and alleged that from 2003 until 2008, Snyder, an employee with the IRS since 1991, improperly accessed the IRS accounts of local sports figures and Hollywood actors such as Kevin Bacon, Alec Baldwin, Sally Field, Chevy Chase, Randy Quaid, and Tara Reid amongst others. Snyder also looked at five pedestrian accounts, including one belonging to his next door neighbor.
The Affidavit also states that the IRS possesses a data base that contains sensitive, personal and tax information on all tax payers. IRS employees are permitted to access the information for business purposes only. However, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) conducted a routine analysis to look for suspicious accesses from employees. The affidavit alleges his search resulted in the discovery of numerous suspected unauthorized accesses by Snyder, who works almost exclusively with business accounts as opposed to individual tax payer accounts.
Source: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Kentucky
Of the library services responding to a recent survey from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), 75% confirmed that they had received enquiries from the police or a security agency during the past 18 months.
The survey showed that enquiries have included a number of “fishing” queries, some aimed at flushing out a terrorist threat.
But CILIP senior policy advisor Barbara Stratton played down concerns about an orchestrated policy of library scrutiny: “We’re pleased that there doesn’t seem to be a widespread problem. There are some local issues from time to time, and mistakes made by personnel on the ground, but not a campaign of surveillance. But it is clear that police are much more aware of what services libraries will offer and want to make enquiries. This is legitimate if the law is followed, and in most cases it is.”
Source: theBookseller.com
LexisNexis, a leading provider of information and services solutions, today announced that it has acquired the assets of Florida Legal Periodicals, a wholly owned subsidiary of Law Bulletin Publishing Company of Chicago. Florida Legal Periodicals is a market leader in the collection and distribution of Florida and Alabama verdict and settlement information. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Theft of Internet connections becoming more common
Although Luis pays his $40-a-month bill to Cox Communications for his Internet, he said he didn’t have time to call the company when he was having problems with his Internet connection.
Instead, he simply searched for another wireless connection in his apartment complex in Gainesville.
Once he found an unsecured connection, he used it. Illegally.
“I needed it to look things up for research,” he said. “I’m kind of lost without the Internet.”
He finished his work and checked his e-mail all from someone’s wireless connection.
Mike Phillips, the agent supervisor of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Florida Computer Crime Center, said most Internet theft occurs in residential areas and apartment complexes.
“It happens all the time, and I think it happens too often,” he said.
He said residents pay for the Internet, buy a wireless router but don’t set up passwords or security to prevent others from stealing the connection.
Source: Gainesville Sun
Flying Without ID? Know What’s in Your Files
Fliers who find themselves attempting to fly without identification should prep themselves on what their old addresses were, when their wedding anniversary is and and their children’s addresses.
Knowing those and other bits of personal information in public records will be key to convincing federal employees to let you past the x-ray machines onto your plane.
That’s because under new rules from the Transportation Security Administration, travelers who try to fly without identification now have to do more than just let screeners paw through their bags and wand them up and down.
Now, those who left their license at home or had it stolen have to answer a series of questions relayed to the screener by employees in TSA’s operations center in Virginia, where employees have access to databases of public records, including those compiled by data giant Lexis Nexis.
The idea is for screeners to know that the person holding a boarding pass in the name of Buster Brown, actually is that person. For travellers without ID, they better hope that the notoriously inaccurate private dossiers about them are correct.
Source: Wired
Future doctors share too much on Facebook, UF researchers say
Would it bother you to know that your physician smokes cigars and likes to do “keg stands”? That your gynecologist was a member of a group called “I Hate Medical School”? That your urologist is a fan of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”?
That is exactly the sort of information many people share on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. According to a new University of Florida study, many medical students are sharing far too much.
“College has traditionally been a time in life when non-normative behaviors are considered OK,” said Dr. Lindsay Acheson Thompson, an assistant professor of general pediatrics at UF’s College of Medicine. “I’m not sure I would want to have a permanent, public record of everything I did 10 years ago, but many of our students are creating just such a record, and they need to understand the problems this may cause.”
Thompson and several researchers from the UF’s colleges of Education and Medicine did a review of the Facebook sites of 362 UF medical students and residents and found that a significant portion of them were publicizing personal information most physicians would never share with their patients.
The study was published this week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
The researchers looked up more than 800 medical students by name on Facebook, finding that 44 percent of them (for a total of 362) had profiles on the social networking service. Only 37 percent of those students had made their Facebook entries private — the most obvious safeguard against revealing too much personal information on the Web.
Source: University of Florida News
Privacy on the Web: Is It a Losing Battle?
Source: Knowledge@Wharton
Visit the Amazon.com site to buy a book online and your welcome page will include recommendations for other books you might enjoy, including the latest from your favorite authors, all based on your history of purchases. Most customers appreciate these suggestions, much the way they would recommendations by a local librarian.
But, what if you visited an investment site, only to find advertising messages suggesting therapies for your recently diagnosed heart condition? Chances are that you would experience what Fran Maier calls the “creepiness” factor, a sense that someone has been snooping into a part of your life that should remain private.
Maier is the Executive Director of TrustE, a nonprofit that sets guidelines for online privacy and awards a seal of approval to companies meeting those guidelines. She was a speaker at the recent Supernova conference, an annual technology event in San Francisco organized by Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach in collaboration with Wharton.
Tools for the attacker, tools for the defender
Like any good tools, network analysis programs can be used for either good or evil. During his weeklong SANS course on in-depth Web application training, Intelguardians consultant Kevin Johnson demonstrated and discussed some of the tools commonly used by both attackers and by Web application penetration testers. These are the tools attackers can gain entry to your system, so you should know know what they are, and what they can do. They are also essential for network security auditing. Most are available for free.
+ The new weakest links: “Web apps are rife with small vulnerabilities that can open the door to big trouble. Thinking like a hacker can help you find them.”
+ Sniffing out passwords on Web sites
+ Watch what you say about yourself
Source: Government Computer News
The Case of the Missing White Pages
There’s no white pages for cellphone numbers, and it doesn’t seem likely that there’ll be one soon. A few years ago, the cellphone industry’s main trade group hired a company to assemble such a directory, but the effort collapsed after some carriers lobbied against it and surveys showed a majority of customers didn’t want it. Subsequent efforts have fared little better: Earlier this year, a company called Intelius shuttered an online directory of 90 million mobile numbers amid anger from cellphone users and threats from Verizon. (Intelius — not Intellius, as I had it earlier — still offers a reverse-lookup service, for a fee.)
In backpedaling, Intelius said that “it’s clear the market is still not ready.” But it may never be.
The principal reason there’s no cellphone directory is simple: We don’t want one.
…
Why not? Because in a number of important ways, the cellphone is more of a break with traditional telephone service than it is an evolution of it. And those differences will only become more apparent in the coming years.
Source: Wall Street Journal