Privacy

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

While most hackers will not target random discarded hard drives, identity theft is a very real threat, and wise users will take steps to protect themselves. One option is to perform a security wipe on the hard drive, which reassigns each bit on the drive three times in order to obscure the data completely. A less costly route is simply to destroy the hard drive. So if you are discarding an old computer, and there is no concern about the functioning of the system, there is an element of fun in harvesting the old hard drive.

Lesson learned, or rather lesson(s) learned, by Tina Sherman and her husband Philip, of Arkansas:

* Don’t send nude photos of yourself to your husband or boyfriend.
* If you are sent nude photos, don’t leave ‘em on your cell phone.
* If you do leave ‘em on your cell phone, at least password-lock the darn thing.

Verizon Wireless said on Thursday that some employees had gained unauthorized access and viewed a personal cell phone account held by President-elect Barack Obama that is now inactive.

An Obama aide said his voice-mail messages and e-mails were not breached in the incident. "We were notified yesterday that employees had accessed the records of an old cell phone no longer in use," the Obama aide said. "No voice or e-mails were listened to or read."

Personal information about employees is more than twice as likely to be compromised in government security breaches than is constituent data, according to an online survey released by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The survey also found that most governments don't keep accurate inventories of where their data is stored in their organization.

Laptops stolen from the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services leave the state computer network vulnerable to hackers and tens of thousands of North Carolinians in danger of identity theft.

None of the dozen DHHS laptops stolen this year was loaded with encryption software, which makes computerized data unintelligible to unauthorized users. Failure to install the software is a violation of state security standards.

The victims are no longer just banks and major retail chains. The University of Florida is the latest university to suffer a data breach. In this case, at least 330,000 current and former dental patients were potentially affected after unauthorized hackers gained access to the school's College of Dentistry computer server, which contained their personal information.

On April 21, 2008, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals essentially gave the U.S. Government carte blanche permission to check any and every piece of data on laptops belonging to travelers passing into the United States at border control checkpoints.

The world’s gone security crazy. Everywhere we go stronger measures are being implemented to combat impersonation, ID theft and fraud. Following news that a leading chain of kiddie’s nurseries in the UK is requiring parents to use fingerprint scanners before collecting their brood, the Post Office has that it is also planning a fingerprinting service to stop scumbags making off with our giros.

A St. Louis company managing prescription benefits of 50 million people said Thursday it called the FBI to investigate an extortion plot threatening to expose personal information, including prescriptions, of millions of its clients.

Express Scripts said it has received an anonymous letter containing the names of some 75 clients that includes dates of birth, Social Security numbers and their prescriptions. The letter threatens to expose millions of patient records if Express Scripts does not pay an undisclosed amount of money.