Stories about: Financial Institutions

Days after Visa seemingly confirmed that a data breach had taken place at a third payment processor, following on the recent breach disclosures by Heartland Payment Systems and RBS WorldPay, the credit card company is now saying that there was no new security incident after all.

A survey of 250 chief information security officers involved in the financial-services world shows that while they have increasing responsibility for IT strategy and planning, they harbor growing concerns about internal security and management support amid the sharp economic downturn.

She had me at hello ... or just about. Our conversation had barely started when privacy activist Betty Ostergren interrupted me to say that she had found my full name, address, Social Security number and a digital image of my signature on the Web.

Salesmen and parents know the technique well. It's called the takeaway, and as far as Keith Mularski is concerned, it's the reason he kept his job as administrator of online fraud site DarkMarket.

Eleven people have been charged or indicted in a massive identity theft and computer fraud scheme involving some of the largest data breaches in recent U.S. history, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

The director of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre believes that the diversity of malware and its abilities to circumvent security products, is the greatest threat on the local cyber crime landscape.

The Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce kicked off its Fraud Fortnight initiative this week, amid initial findings that Australians have dished out more than $700 million falling for online scams.

Spoofers, spammers and phishers, beware. There's a new gun in town, and some of the Internet's most powerful companies -- including Yahoo, Google, PayPal and AOL -- are brandishing it in the ongoing battle against e-mail fraud.

In the past, most enterprises defined a disaster as an act of nature--a hurricane, tornado, flood or fire that wipes out their ability to conduct business as usual. Today, with worldwide networks, 24/7 customer call centers and Web applications, a common electrical failure could spell disaster when communication is interrupted in the supply chain, online transactions are halted or networks are down. Online resource Dictionary.com has even added "business failure" to the list of calamitous events that define a disaster.

How bad was 2007 for breaches, vulnerabilities and similar mayhem? On the bright side, it was better than 2008 is forecast to be. With more of every sort of meltdown predicted -- more criminalization of the hacker community, more Web-application attacks, more phishing, more spamming, more zero-day attacks and more virtualization-related threats -- we're happy to tell you that you are likely to look back on 2007 as the peaceful old days.