Ponder this for a moment: Credit- and debt-card purchases now outweigh cash transactions. We are a world that lives on plastic. But how often do you physically lose sight of your credit card when paying for something? One of the few times is when you're at a restaurant.
A laptop containing data on 11,000 children between the ages of eight months and eight years old has been stolen from a Nottinghamshire hospital.
Hackers have built their own encrypted IM (instant-message) program to shield themselves from law enforcement trying to spy on their communication channels.
The application, called CarderIM, is a sophisticated tool hackers are using to sell information such as credit-card numbers or e-mail addresses, part of an underground economy dealing in financial data, said Andrew Moloney, business director for financial services for RSA, part of EMC, during a presentation at the International e-crime Congress in London on Wednesday.
Experts have called for a halt in the spread of CCTV cameras.
Britain is now being watched by a staggering 4.2million - one for every 14 people and a fifth of the cameras in the entire world.
The Royal Academy of Engineering also warned that lives could be put at risk by the lurch towards a 'big brother' society in which the Government and even supermarkets hold huge amounts of personal information on us.
It said any system was vulnerable to abuse - including bribery of staff and computer hackers gaining access.
The personal information - including Social Security numbers - of 71,000 Indiana state health care workers were accessed by a hacker in January.
The attacker accessed the data, as well as the credit card information of 5,600 individuals and businesses.
Notification letters have been sent to certified nurse?s aides, medication aides and home health aides, warning them to review credit reports for misuse.
After the country's largest managed care firm began informing customers that an unencrypted disc with the personal and health information of about 75,000 people had been lost, the company found it Wednesday afternoon.
WellPoint did not release any information on where the disc was found. A press advisory said that Health Data Management Solutions, a third-party vendor, had shipped the CD via UPS to Magellan Behavioral Health Services, and it had been lost in transit. Magellan monitors and coordinates substance abuse and mental health treatments for insurance companies.
Google will start making its records about users' searches anonymous after 18 to 24 months under a policy announced Wednesday. Until now, the dominant search company has indefinitely retained a log of every search with identifiers that can associate it with a particular computer. The new policy, to be implemented within the next year, is intended to better protect users' privacy, two executives wrote in a Google Blog entry posted Wednesday.
Federal prosecutors are trying to determine if a Wal-Mart systems technician who was fired for spying on fellow employees broke any federal laws.
Wal-Mart said last week that the employee was fired for intercepting text messages and recording telephone conversations without authorization. The company conducted an internal investigation that started after one of the employee's colleagues "expressed concerns" about the recordings, according to a release from Wal-Mart.
Sweden's government presented a contentious plan to allow a defense intelligence agency to monitor email traffic and phone calls crossing the nation's borders without a court order, an Associated Press report said.
The Associated Press report said the government insists only a fraction of the electronic communication will be affected, but critics worry that the program, designed to combat terrorism and other threats to national security, is too far-reaching.
Almost 450,000 requests were made to monitor people?s telephone calls, e-mails and post by secret agencies and other authorised bodies in just over a year, the spying watchdog said yesterday.
In the first report of its kind from the Interceptions of Communications Commissioner, it was also revealed that nearly 4,000 errors were reported in a 15-month period from 2005 to 2006. While most appeared to concern ?lower-level data? such as requests for telephone lists and individual e-mail addresses, 67 were mistakes concerning direct interception of communications.
