It was widely reported last week that as part of a study, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) randomly dropped USB and optical drives in government and private contractor parking lots -- and more than half of those who picked one up readily plugged it into their work computer.
Lucas Mearian | 07 Jul | Read more
While Google's new social network, Google+, is barely a week old, it's already received a lot of attention from tech pundits and the social media community. And as with any new online service, understanding how to control your information is essential.
Kristin Burnham | 07 Jul | Read more
Google's new social networking site Google+, built to beat Facebook primarily on privacy features, has several privacy bugs the company is working to fix.
Juan Carlos Perez | 07 Jul | Read more
A proposal to force employers to use the federal <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135526/DHS_Congress_look_to_strengthen_E_Verify_system">E-Verify system</a> to vet new employees has stoked widespread privacy concerns.
Jaikumar Vijayan | 06 Jul | Read more
Mobile payments technology is a loud sonic boom thundering through the payments industry. But are all -- or any -- of these payment schemes compliant with the <a href="http://www.csoonline.com/article/519563/the-great-pci-security-debate-of-2010-transcribed">Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS?)</a>
George V. Hulme | 05 Jul | Read more
The UK’s Information Commissioner has ordered the National Health Service to tighten its grip on security, fearing that data protection is a “systemic problem” for its organisations. Five health NHS organisations have signed recent data security undertakings in response to potential privacy breaches this year caused by staff losing patient records, faxing medical reports to the wrong number, and losing laptops.
Hacked email marketing vendor Epsilon has implemented a “white list” of IP addresses that will be allowed to access its email platform to prevent a repeat of its recent mega breach.
After nearly four chaotic years, Australia's internet filtering scheme is finally coming together in a way that makes sense technically and politically, if not necessarily for effective child protection.
Stilgherrian | 30 Jun | Read more
Since 1997 identity theft and fraud has affected more than 5.4 million people in the United States. And that number is on the rise with, more than 1.3 million complaints to the <a href="http://www.ftc.gov/sentinel/">Consumer Sentinel Network</a> (CSN) between January and December of 2009 alone. <a href="http://www.ftc.gov/sentinel/reports/sentinel-annual-reports/sentinel-cy2009.pdf">According to the Federal Trade Commission</a> (PDF), of the 721,418 fraud-related complaints to the CSN in 2009, this has cost customers [of various products and services] more than 1.7 billion dollars at a median payout of $399. But what can companies do to prevent fraud and identity theft?
James Mulroy | 30 Jun | Read more
Linda Goodspeed, vice president of IT at Nissan North America, was attending a global IT meeting at her company's head office in Japan on March 11 and was caught in the magnitude 9.0 earthquake. The quake was among the top seven most powerful ever recorded and the strongest ever to hit the country. "People were diving under desks. Women were crying. We could see fire outside," she says. "Window blinds were moving three feet to the left and to the right. I thought the building would fall apart."
Kim S. Nash | 30 Jun | Read more
Democratic members of a Senate committee promised Wednesday to push hard for new online privacy protections and for legislation that would require companies to put security monitoring tools on their networks.
Grant Gross | 30 Jun | Read more
An investigation by the Acting NSW Privacy Commissioner, John McAteer, into the University of Sydney's security breach in January has found that the institution failed to meet its obligations to students under the Privacy and Personal Information Protection (PPIP) Act of 1998 due to a series of security blunders.
Hamish Barwick | 29 Jun | Read more
The federal agency that regulates banks today issued new rules for online <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/security.html">security</a> for financial institutions, instructing them to use minimal types of "layered security" and fraud monitoring to better protect against <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2011/062311-andreas.html">cybercrime</a>.
Ellen Messmer | 29 Jun | Read more
With the surge in <a href="http://blogs.csoonline.com/hacktivism">hacktivism</a> and nation-state espionage in recent years, not to mention the continuing high levels of cybercrime, companies need better tools to evaluate the quality of any developer's code.
Robert Lemos | 29 Jun | Read more
The user database of Groupon's Indian subsidiary, SoSasta, was published on the Internet and indexed by Google, according to an Australian security consultant.
John Ribeiro | 28 Jun | Read more
A 27-year-old man has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for managing a phishing operation in conjunction with Egyptian hackers that looted consumer bank accounts.
Jeremy Kirk | 28 Jun | Read more
Not only does the U.S. government regularly request users' private data from Google, it does so more often than any other government, the search engine reported Monday. Google announced these details as part of its <a href="http://www.google.com/transparencyreport">Transparency Report</a>, a bi-annual disclosure of what governments worldwide are asking for.
Three New York PlayStation Network users last week filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Sony spends 'lavishly' to secure its own intellectual property while cutting corners in protecting the personal data of its customers.
Jaikumar Vijayan | 28 Jun | Read more
Companies and bloggers that run their own WordPress installations should make sure that they have not downloaded any of three popular plugins that were, for about 24 hours, playing host to <a href="http://www.csoonline.com/topic/43400/malware-cybercrime">malicious code</a>, WordPress creator Auttomatic warned.
Robert Lemos | 25 Jun | Read more
The European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda has told Web companies to come up with a do-not-track standard by mid-2012, or the Commission will have to impose new rules.
Jennifer Baker | 24 Jun | Read more