When it comes to data breaches, how does 2011 compare with previous years? A new report from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) notes 535 breaches during 2011, involving 30.4 million sensitive records. But that’s just a conservative estimate, since not all data breaches see the light of day. “Because many states do not require companies to report data breaches to a central clearinghouse, data breaches occur that we never hear about,” said PRC director Beth Givens in the report.
Even so, 2011 saw some of the biggest or most significant breaches in history, PRC says:
1. Sony. Sony suffered over a dozen data breaches, stemming from attacks that compromised Sony PlayStation Network, Sony Online Entertainment, and Sony Pictures, among other Sony-owned websites. Notably, these breaches occurred after Sony had laid off many of its security personnel in the months preceding the attacks. Ultimately, Sony faced an ongoing customer relations fallout–as well as class-action lawsuits–over its failure to protect over 100 million user records. Owing to the frequency with which users reuse passwords, many Sony customers are now at risk from attackers using the stolen password data to access their accounts on other sites.
2. Epsilon. When companies outsource business processes, who’s ultimately responsible for the security of any shared customer data? Answer: the company that outsourced the job. That’s the lesson from the April breach of cloud-based email service provider Epsilon, which fell to a spear-phishing attack. The breach affected data from 75 of Epsilon’s clients–meaning, businesses that had trusted Epsilon with their customers’ data. “Epsilon has not disclosed the names of the companies affected or the total number of names stolen,” according to the PRC report. “However, millions of customers received notices from a growing list of companies, making this the largest security breach ever.” Conservative estimates are that 60 million customer emails addresses were breached.
3. RSA. One of the most high-profile breaches of 2011 didn’t involve consumer information, but rather one of the world’s most-used two-factor authentication systems. After attackers breached the systems of EMC’s RSA in April, stealing information relating to its SecurID system, the company drew fire for failing to detail exactly what had been stolen, or exactly how the attack put customers at risk of being exploited. RSA ultimately traced the attack to an unnamed nation state, and revealed that the exploit had relied on a very low-tech spear-phishing attack. One significant result of the attack has been that many companies are now retooling their security and training processes to help prevent these types of low-cost, easy-to-execute social-engeineering attacks from succeeding.
4. Sutter Physicians Services. Data from both Sutter Physicians Services and Sutter Medical Foundation was breached in November when a thief stole a desktop computer from the organization, which contained about 3.3 million patients’ medical details–including name, address, phone number, email address and health insurance plan name–stored in encrypted format. “The security lapse occurred on two levels: both the data itself (being unencrypted) and the physical location (stored in an unsecure location),” according to the PRC report. A class-action lawsuit lodged against the companies alleged that they also failed to inform affected patients about the breach in a timely manner.
5. Tricare and SAIC. In September, backup tapes containing SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) data were stolen from the car of a Tricare employee. Much of that data related to current and retired members of the armed services, as well as their families. The breach led to a $4.9 billion lawsuit being filed, which aims to award $1,000 to each of the 5.1 million people affected by the breach. “The Tricare/SAIC breach is significant because not only are the victims at risk of medical identity theft, but financial identity theft as well. The breach begs several questions: Why were the backup tapes being transported in an employee’s personal vehicle? And why were those records not encrypted?” according to the PRC report.
6. Nasdaq. Not all breaches target massive quantities of customer data. Notably, attackers breached Directors Desk, a cloud-based Nasdaq system designed to facilitate boardroom-level communications for 10,000 senior executives and company directors. By monitoring Directors Desk, attackers may have had access to inside information, which they could have sold to competitors or perhaps used to make beneficial stock market trades.
Prepare For Breaches What’s the takeaway from the above six breaches? First, data breaches are a fact of life, and in all industries. Accordingly, security experts recommend that businesses have a data breach response plan formulated in advance. You should also have the right processes and technology in place to spot a breach.
But it’s important to proactively stop data breaches too. To help, the PRC report highlighted the importance that companies must place on creating “strict privacy and security policies,” as well as data retention policies. Furthermore, businesses could avoid “breaches” simply by properly encrypting all sensitive information. Notably, if encrypted data gets lost or stolen, it doesn’t count as a data breach or trigger consumer notification requirements.
Life is full of entertaining ironies, especially when it comes to criminals. Case in point; one identity thief who was notorious for stealing credit card applications from the U.S. Postal Service. Well, Gerald K. Acholonu, the thief we are talking about, met his fate when investigators sifted through his trash and found materials that re-confirmed their suspicions about his illegal activity. Isn’t it Ironic?
So, our headline may be a bit misleading. It turns out that Acholonu was able to gain access to a massive amount of mail when he worked for a private contractor to the U.S. Postal Service. He was actually seen leaving work holding piles of credit card offers from the mail. He did not actually do any dumpster diving. But, he did get busted when investigators searched the trash bin outside of his apartment building and found the incriminating evidence.
Welcome to the Monday Morning News Kick Off post from the ITAC blog. We hope everyone had a restful holiday weekend. Though as we all know — that although it is technically a holiday week — the world of cybercrime does not slow down. That is why we have been kind enough to pull together all the key identity theft, data breach and cyber security stories you need in one convenient location. Happy Monday!
Rise In Child Identity Theft Prompts Push For Solutions
When Jennifer Andrushko applied for public aid two years ago, a state employee entered her son Carter’s Social Security number into a computer and discovered something strange: The boy appeared to have been earning wages for the past eight years. “I thought, ‘How could this be happening? He’s only three years old,’” Andrushko said. It turned out an undocumented immigrant had been using Carter’s number to acquire jobs since before he was born. But Carter proved relatively fortunate. Unlike many child identity theft victims who do not realize their credit is ruined until they reach adulthood, his case was caught while he was young, giving him time to recover his good name. Read the full Huffington Post article here.
Lax Security Exposes Voice Mail to Hacking, Study Says
It may be tempting to view the illegal interception of telephone voice mails, a practice that has roiled Britain and the News Corp. media empire of Rupert Murdoch, as an arcane tool employed by scofflaw journalists with friends in Scotland Yard. But according to a study to be presented Tuesday, cellphone users in Europe and the rest of the world may be just as vulnerable as the actor Hugh Grant and other celebrities to having their personal voice mail hacked — or worse — because of outdated mobile network security. Read more from the NY Times here.
Insurance Against Cyber Attacks Expected to Boom
Sony is still awaiting the final tally for losses related to its data breaches earlier this year. At last count, it had compromised 100 million customer accounts, and Sony anticipated the debacle would cost $200 million. With 58 class-action suits in the works, that may be wishful thinking. Now for the really bad news: Sony’s losses aren’t insured. In a lawsuit, Sony’s insurer, the Zurich American Insurance Company, reminded the company it does not own a cyber insurance policy. Sony’s policy only covers tangible losses like property damage, not cyber incidents. Read more from the NY Times here.
Stratfor Targeted by Hacking Group Anonymous
he loosely-associated band of hackers known as Anonymous claims to have targeted the global intelligence think tank Strategic Forecasting, known as Stratfor, boasting on the microblogging site Twitter that personal information, including credit card numbers, belonging to Stratfor clients had been stolen. As of Monday morning, Stratfor’s Website was down, with a placeholder page saying the site was undergoing maintenance and asking visitors to “check back soon.” Read more from eWeek here.
Medical Data Breaches Affected More Than 10 Million Americans In 2011
2011 has been a bad year for medical data breaches. The medical records of more than ten million Americans were exposed this year. The San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has issued a list of this year’s six most significant data breaches. The insurer Health Net suffered one of the worst, when nine data servers went missing from a Northern California data center in January. The servers contained records of nearly two million current and former policy holders. Read more from KPBS here.
Enterprise Data Breaches: Insider Threats That Cause Most Losses
Organizations are beefing up their network and data defenses to protect sensitive information and intellectual property from attackers. But enterprise management often forgets that their own employees and contractors can also pose a threat. A recent Symantec report found that approximately 65 percent of malicious data thieves are on their way out the door to join a competitor or start their own company. More than half of the data theft occurs within a month before an employee’s departure, according to the study. Check out more from eWeek here.
Each year, we like to extend a heart-warming thanks to all of our readers and wish them a safe, healthy and happy holiday season. This is the time of year for reflection, spending time with loved-ones and gearing up for a prosperous new year. As we all know, unfortunately, criminals are still out there trying to gain access to our valuable and personal information.
So, we urge everyone to be safe over the holidays with your personal data. While you may be enjoying some much-needed downtime from work, identity thieves are waiting for you to let your guard down.
Always be vigilant. Always be smart and have a safe and happy holiday season!
It now seems that major lobbying organizations are now a target of international hackers. A group of hackers in China breached the computer defenses of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and gained access to everything stored on its systems, including information about its three million members, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The word is that this is the boldest known infiltration in the regular cyber-confrontation between U.S. companies and Chinese hackers. It isn’t clear how much of the compromised data was viewed by the hackers. Chamber officials say internal investigators found evidence that hackers had focused on four Chamber employees who worked on Asia policy, and that six weeks of their email had been stolen.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Chamber learned of the break-in when the Federal Bureau of Investigation told the group that servers in China were stealing its information.
Chamber officials say they haven’t been able to keep intruders completely out of their system, but now can detect and isolate attacks quickly.
The Chamber continues to see suspicious activity, they say. A thermostat at a town house the Chamber owns on Capitol Hill at one point was communicating with an Internet address in China, they say, and, in March, a printer used by Chamber executives spontaneously started printing pages with Chinese characters.
In mid-September, a European hacker nicknamed Poxxie broke into the computer network of a U.S. company and, he said, grabbed 1,400 credit-card numbers, the account holders’ names and addresses, and the security code that comes with each card. With little trouble, he sold the numbers for $3.50 each on his own seller’s site, called CVV2s.in, to underworld buyers who have come to trust the quality of his goods, he said.
“The main thing in any business is honesty,” Poxxie said, without any trace of irony.
The Traverse City, Michigan-based Ponemon Institute, which researches data security, estimates that thieves annually steal 8.4 million credit-card numbers in the U.S. alone. How do cyberbandits, who have turned hacking into a volume business, unload all those numbers. A lot like Amazon.com, it turns out.
Customers on CVV2s can search for card numbers by bank, card type, credit limit and zip code, loading them into a virtual shopping basket as they go. The site offers the ability to search by bank identification number. That means customers can choose cards by institutions known to have weak security, Poxxie said. CVV2s even has an automated feature that lets clients validate the numbers in real time, to make sure the bank hasn’t canceled the card.
Sites like Poxxie’s make up the cyberunderworld’s version of a pirate’s cove, offering their online booty at cut-rate prices. Hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen data are bought and sold in underground’s chat rooms and forums every year, a fencing operation that becomes more robust annually, according to RSA, the security division of EMC Corp. CrackHackForum.com, one of the sites, even mimics EBay Inc., rating buyers and sellers with starred reviews.
Welcome to the Monday Morning News Kick Off post from the ITAC blog. What do the Iowa Caucus, Gene Simmons and Malcolm X’s daughter all have in common? They are popping up in major stories about cyber security, data breaches and identity theft right now. Who would have thought that a simple blog that focuses on identity theft would have so much celebrity new to share? So, check out these stories and more in the following post. Happy Monday!
Iowa Caucus Polling System Threatened By Hackers
Republican Party officials in Iowa are taking new steps to secure their vote counting systems after an anonymous threat suggested computer hackers could attempt to disrupt next month’s presidential nominating caucuses. A video uploaded to YouTube features a computer-generated voice denouncing a corrupt political system and calls on supporters to “peacefully shut down” the Jan. 3 caucuses. The video claims to be from Anonymous, a loosely organized group of hackers who have successfully conducted past computer attacks. Investigators aren’t sure whether the video is authentic, but party officials have instructed precinct caucuses to use paper ballots as a backup system and taken other steps to protect the database and website that displays caucus results. Read the full Fox News piece here.
ID Theft Ring Targeted Charitable Donors
A crime ring used corrupt employees in banks, an Audi car dealership, and the nonprofit United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York to steal identities of well-heeled customers, clients, and donors and defraud them of more than $2 million, New York authorities said on Friday. The indictment of 55 defendants on a variety of grand larceny, identity theft and other charges marked the fourth major cybercrime prosecution announced in as many weeks, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said at a news conference, underscoring his contention that “the Internet is the crime scene of the 21st century.” Read the full Reuters story here.
Square Enix to Reopen Hacked Site, Says No Private Data Lost
Japanese game developer Square Enix said Monday that no private data was stolen when a server for a fan site was hacked last week, and it plans to reopen the site to users by the end of the year. The company shut down the “Square Enix Members” site for the U.S. and Japan last week immediately after finding unknown parties had accessed its server. The hacked machine stores registration details including e-mail addresses, names, addresses and phone numbers on 1.8 million users, but no credit card information. The European version of the site was not affected. Read the full PC World article here.
Anonymous Hacker Arrested for Attack on Gene Simmons’s Website
A member of the international hacker group Anonymous was arrested this morning after he conducted a sophisticated cyberattack on a website operated by KISS rocker and Family Jewels star Gene Simmons. Kevin George Poe, 24, was taken into custody by federal authorities at his home in Manchester, Conn. He is charged with two federal counts of conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. If convicted, Poe could face up to 15 years in federal prison. Read the full Daily Beast post here.
Malcolm X Youngest Daughter Behind Bars in Identity Theft Case
Malikah Shabazz, the youngest daughter of black civil rights leader Malcolm X, is in prison for failing to start paying back money stolen in an identity theft case, law enforcement sources confirmed on Thursday. Shabazz, 46, pleaded guilty in June to stealing the identity of a longtime family friend and using it to make $55,000 in credit card purchases. She was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to pay restitution of $1,229.45 each month, beginning in September, to repay the full amount of illegal charges. Read the full Reuters story here.
NYC Officer Arrested in ID Fraud Scheme
Prosecutors say a 23-year-old New York City police officer has been arrested on grand larceny and forgery charges as part of massive identity theft takedown earlier this year. Officer Raymond Gumti who works at the Police Academy is accused of giving his mother’s credit card numbers and other identification to men accused of running a mass ID theft scheme. The arrest Thursday is related to an October takedown in which more than 100 people were arrested. Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said at the time that five separate criminal enterprises operating out of Queens were dismantled. They were hit with hundreds of charges. Read the full WSJ article here.
Smartphones Blamed for Increasing Risk of Health Data Breaches
The number of physicians using smartphones has reached a near-saturation point. Meanwhile, the number of data breaches is going up. Coincidence? Leading experts think not. Recent reports by Manhattan Research have found more than 81% of physicians use a smartphone, up from 72% in 2010. Also on the rise have been data breaches, which, according to research released in December by Ponemon Institute, have risen 32% in the past year. Ponemon found that 96% of all health care organizations surveyed said they had experienced at least one data breach in the past two years. Read the full American Medical News article here.
In today’s turbulent technological environment, many organizations often have the best security software money can buy, with equally developed policies with which to execute them, but they fail to take into account the weakest link in their implementation: human nature. Despite all other efforts, people can sway from what they should be doing. A new book called “Preventing Good People from Doing Bad Things,” which is co-authored by security experts John Mutch and Brian Anderson, addresses the issue of insider threats head-on. Today we are speaking with Brian Anderson about this new book.
A U.S. District Judge has ruled to dismiss the majority of claims included in a multi-institution suit against Heartland Payment Systems, which in 2008 was hacked, ultimately compromising 130 million U.S. debit and credit cards.
The Heartland breach, announced in January 2009, was the first card processor breach to attract international attention. A multiparty complaint against Heartland ultimately resulted, after the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated individual suits filed by consumers and U.S. banking institutions seeking financial compensation for losses suffered as a result of systems breach.
But earlier this month, after more than two years of litigation, District Judge Lee Rosenthal dismissed the majority of those claims, saying the plaintiffs failed “to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.”
One exception, however, was noted in Rosenthal’s ruling. A violation of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act claimed in one of the banking institution suits may be amended. Rosenthal found that the banks’ and credit unions’ claim could be heard if amended to include more than one state’s law and inclusion of more specific details about alleged contractual violations.
In case you have not been following the whole brouhaha about the new TLC show All-American Muslim and how home retailer Lowes dropped its advertising support foe the show, here’s a quick update: Anonymous has stepped in seeking vigilante justice by hacking the Florida Family Association (FFA). The rogue hacker group targeted the FFA for its role in persuading the Lowes to drop its advertising support for the show.
The word is that hackers worked through 15 levels of security to achieve a small breach into the FFA’s online systems, prompting their webmaster to shut down the site to avoid further incursion.
For weeks, the FFA sent out numerous email alerts denouncing the program as “propaganda” that “hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties.
Though fret not, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons has stepped in and has bought up the surplus advertising space for the show.
When it comes to data breaches, how does 2011 compare with previous years? A new report from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) notes 535 breaches during 2011, involving 30.4 million sensitive records. But that’s just a conservative estimate, since not all data breaches see the light of day. “Because many states do not require companies to report data breaches to a central clearinghouse, data breaches occur that we never hear about,” said PRC director Beth Givens in the report.
Life is full of entertaining ironies, especially when it comes to criminals. Case in point; one identity thief who was notorious for stealing credit card applications from the U.S. Postal Service. Well, Gerald K. Acholonu, the thief we are talking about, met his fate when investigators 
Welcome to the Monday Morning News Kick Off post from the ITAC blog. We hope everyone had a restful holiday weekend. Though as we all know — that although it is technically a holiday week — the world of cybercrime does not slow down. That is why we have been kind enough to pull together all the key identity theft, data breach and cyber security stories you need in one convenient location. Happy Monday!
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