Data Security

Until murky details are cleared up, follow best practices for protecting personal information Equifax needs to start answering questions, fast. And this better be a turning point in consumer rights around use and storage of their personal information. It’s not even clear from the PR-worded statement that 143 million Social Security numbers were stolen, though that’s the clear implication. All we know is most...

When Equifax announced the historic data compromise that exposed the sensitive personal information of up to 143 million consumers, the company said victims would have access to credit freezes for a month free of charge. This was not exactly a solution to the fresh hell it had just announced. Frankly, it seemed like a relatively cheeky move considering the staggering number of...

From mid-May to July, 143 million U.S. consumers were more vulnerable to hackers than usual. Or rather, they were actively vulnerable. Equifax, one of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies, reported that the company had suffered a massive data compromise that exposed their customers' Social Security numbers, drivers license numbers and other sensitive personally identifiable information. In a statement, they...

The announcement of a sixth subterranean nuclear test has the world talking about how to contain the threat of a nuke-ready North Korea, but there is another concern getting insufficient attention: the potential for full spectrum cyber war. Just what that might look like is known, but seldom discussed. Remember the NASDAQ flash crash? It happened on May 6, 2010, at...

If you're one of those folks who believed that "it will never happen to me," when it comes to identity theft, the hack of Adobe's internal database isn't just bad news -- it's scary. It is increasingly inevitable that every business will suffer some kind of data breach -- and that each of us will be a victim of...

As political battle lines are drawn over the case of Edward Snowden and the NSA's sophisticated program of electronic surveillance, it's easy to forget our simplest and most common vulnerability to spying eyes: email. Just in the past few months, databases at LivingSocial and Evernote were hacked, exposing roughly 100 million email addresses to identity thieves. Facebook allegedly exposed 6...

For those of us who care about privacy, these past seven days have truly sucked. With relatively little fanfare in the midst of a cacophonous (that means "noisy," Senator Santorum) parade of news, three significant events seriously undermined our constitutional right to privacy and highlighted (in a muted sort of way) the extent to which new business practices and perhaps...

Last week I expressed my concern over efforts in Congress to delay, defang and ultimately defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I called upon consumers to rebel against being treated as little more than pachyderm toe-jam and to send a clear message in 2012 to those in Congress who have been the spear carriers for business. My consternation over the...

There was a time, when the World Wide Web was young, that many entrepreneurs counted on the idea they could make money the old-fashioned way–by charging cyber-customers on a per-use basis, the same way they charged traditional brick-and-mortar patrons. Most print magazines, for example, felt they could make a seamless transition from paid print subscriptions to paid Internet subscriptions....

Last week, the President and Commander in Chief announced something many Americans had been anticipating (though less and less, as time passed) for nearly a decade. Osama bin Laden, the person responsible for the single largest murder of Americans in history had been found and summarily executed in a stunningly efficient covert operation carried out by the Navy Seals. Not...