Consumer Security

A firestorm of fury has erupted over behavioral tracking -- the tracking of consumers online by marketing companies and advertisers to serve them up with targeted advertisements when they're on the Web. Both consumer organizations and trade and industry groups have responded to the Federal Trade Com...

Spending your tax refund before it arrives? You might want to rethink that plan -- and not just because it's fiscally imprudent. There is a growing chance that this tax season you'll learn for the first time that you were the victim of identity theft at some point during the last year. A disturbing ...

Scarborough, Maine-based Hannaford Bros. in a Boston Globe report Friday confirmed that malware that had been installed on the 271-store chain's servers led to a data breach that compromised as many as 4.2 million debit and credit card accounts. Hannaford told Massachusetts regulators that it found ...

Having your private information leaked is bad enough, but having it put on BitTorrent is really the final insult. It happened before with MySpace photos. By most accounts, the private images made available earlier this year via peer-to-peer networks consisted mostly of poorly snapped photos of peopl...

Fraud is big business. Well-funded, well-orchestrated, sophisticated fraud rings aggressively change tactics and invent new technologies to cash in on the unprotected assets awaiting plunder. Every organization that provides individual service to its customers, employees, members or community is fac...

What's most important to consumers when making a purchase online? Personal identity. Consumers are taking more notice of their individual online security after a string of recent identity theft cases made major headlines. According to a recent survey by University of Southern California's Center f...

Depending on which set of criteria you reference, ID fraud either is on a significant decline or will be a lingering threat for several more years. The general trend points downward. Overall, 2007 saw a 12 percent drop in ID fraud incidences to $6 billion, according to Javelin Strategy & Researc...

Despite the overwhelming success of e-commerce, there are still consumers out there too terrified to click their cart through a virtual checkout. Are they just a silly-nilly group, nutty as a bunch of conspiracy theorists? Or are the rest of us just too naive to get it? Neither, it turns out. "There...

As the number of identity theft victims continues to mount, so has the amount of data and information related to such events -- and the time and resources devoted to better understanding, analyzing and devising measures that can better prevent such occurrences. "The stakes are already quite high whe...

Private, personally identifying information is everywhere, from portable computers and digital devices, to the Internet and private networks. This data can be obtained so easily -- either through technology or more mundane means -- and its theft is so often glamorized on film, that it is starting to...

Facebook has named three individuals and a Canadian porn company as defendants in a federal lawsuit it filed earlier this year in the Northern District of California, which accused unnamed people and companies of unlawfully accessing its servers. After two Canadian Internet service providers provide...

Despite being given a deadline of Sept. 30, 2007, to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, many Level 1 merchants -- those that process more than 6 million transactions per year -- still do not meet the necessary requirements. In fact, Visa reports that as much as 40 percent ...

The price tag on the largest database breach on record moved higher Friday with TJX agreeing to pay nearly $41 million to settle with credit card companies and banks that were forced to issue new cards to customers of the retailer to prevent or recover fraudulent charges. TJX said it would pay $40.9

Companies that fail to prevent data breaches will pay higher costs to repair the damage in 2008, according to a recent report. Data breach incidents will also cost these companies additional revenue from lost business opportunities and reduced customer retention. Data breaches cost companies $197 pe...

A data theft revealed over the weekend of some 1.6 million records from Monster.com does not raise issues of identity theft, the employment Web site asserted. "[T]here have been reports of this as an issue of 'identify theft,'" Monster Vice President of Compliance and Fraud Prevention Patrick W. Man...