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Thieves are stealing credit-card numbers through skimmers they secretly installed inside pumps at gas stations throughout the Southeast, using Bluetooth wireless to transmit stolen card numbers, according to law enforcement officials. “We’ve sent detectives out to every gas station within a mile of Interstate 75,” says Lt. Steve Maynard, spokesman for the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office, which last Thursday was first notified about a suspicious skimming device discovered by a maintenance worker at a Shell Station located in the vicinity of Gainesville, Fla. So far, three card-skimming devices hidden in gas pumps at three stations have been discovered by investigators, and the U.S. Secret Service has been notified. The Sheriff’s Office, along with other local police departments, are trying to inspect as many gas stations in the area as possible, especially focusing on those along I-75. But law enforcement is encouraging gas station operators to look for signs of the skimmers at their pumps and contact them if they think they’ve found something. The Secret Service has indicated there’s a crime wave throughout the Southeast involving the gas-station pump card skimmers, and it may be traced back to a single gang that may be working out of Miami, Maynard says. Nearby St. Johns County in Florida has also been hit by the gas-pump card skimmers. Maynard says criminals wanting to hide the credit-card skimmers in gas pumps must have a key to the pump, but in some cases, a single key will serve to get into many gas pumps. It’s not known whether the gas-pump skimming operation involves insiders. Law enforcement is encouraging gas-station operators to train video surveillance they may use on the pumps.

For more information go to: http://www.knowconnect.com/mirln/current AND/OR http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179136/Bluetooth_at_heart_of_gas_station_credit_card_scam_in_Southeast_?taxonomyId=85

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Many Companies Continue to Ignore the Issue (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 22 June 2010) – After a year of high-tech breaches at some of the nation’s biggest companies, a provision in a Senate bill calls on the White House to encourage a market for cybersecurity insurance to protect businesses from debilitating costs brought on by hacking and compromised information. The bill, introduced by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, says the president or his appointee must report to Congress on “the feasibility of creating a market for cybersecurity risk management” one year after the bill’s passing. But a crashed server policy is not as easy to write as a crashed car policy. Many businesses are deterred by an application process described as appropriately exhaustive but forever imprecise. The process is complicated by the tricky nature of monetizing data. Web experts always have held that “information wants to be free.” But how much is it worth when it’s stolen? Companies lost an average of $234,000 per breach in 2009, a recent report by the Computer Security Institute in New York found. But a report released last Tuesday by the Carnegie Mellon CyLab found that 65 percent of its Fortune 1,000 respondents were not reviewing their companies’ cybersecurity policies. Jody Westby, a researcher who worked on the CyLab report that indicated board negligence, said the insurance provision in the cybersecurity bill was a mandate by an ill-informed Congress. “This is interventionist, regulatory, heavy-handed action by Congress,” said Ms. Westby from an technology best practices conference in Burkina Faso, West Africa. “This isn’t anything that Congress is going to fix,” she said. “It’s something boards in America need to fix.”

For more information please visit: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10173/1067262-96.stm AND/OR http://www.knowconnect.com/mirln/current/

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NEW YORK (AP) – Apple Inc. will hold a press conference on Friday to discuss the latest iPhone model amid complaints about its antenna and Consumer Reports magazine’s refusal to endorse it until the problems get fixed.

Apple would not provide details on the nature of the event at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., other than to say it will involve the iPhone 4.

On Monday, Consumer Reports said careful testing has confirmed user reports that holding the phone over a particular spot drastically reduces the signal strength it receives. Covering the spot with duct tape or a case alleviates the problem.

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Organizers claim more than 30,000 people deleted their accounts on the world’s most popular social network service (SNS), a drop in Facebook’s half-billion-person ocean, but an important symbol.

What did Facebook do wrong?

They’ve been playing fast and loose with privacy. Every time Facebook restructures its privacy controls—say whether your photos can be seen by only certain friends, all your friends, friends of friends, or the whole world—the new default settings always open up your private information to more viewers. Check this infographic.

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Critics of “three-strikes” laws think society risks disenfranchising large segments of the population, especially with outdated copyright laws more relevant to a world before digital distribution.

In an age of growing attempts by copyright holders to implement so-called “three-strikes” legislation to deal with online piracy, some think Internet disconnection for accused file-sharers could raise concerns over the “right to freedom of expression.”

“It’s a social inclusion question,” says Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre executive director David Vaile.

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AT&T Inc. acknowledged Wednesday that a security hole in its website had exposed iPad users’ email addresses, a breach that highlights how corporations still have problems protecting private information.

A small group of computer experts that calls itself Goatse Security claimed responsibility for the intrusion, saying the group had exploited an opening in AT&T’s website to find numbers that identify iPads connected to AT&T’s mobile network.

Those numbers allowed the group to uncover 114,000 email addresses of thousands of iPad customers, including prominent officials in companies, politics and the military, the group said. Gawker Media LLC reported the breach Wednesday. It doesn’t appear any financial or billing information was made public.

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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently filed a series of comment letters with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) supporting that agency’s consideration of privacy and data security in the development of its Broadband Plan. The first of these letters,[1] dated December 9, 2009, highlights the extent to which federal agencies, including the FTC and FCC, are focusing their resources on privacy and data security issues in response to the rapid expansion in recent years of Internet-based software and data services (commonly referred to as “cloud computing”), and the growing dependence by businesses on authentication and credentialing (what the FTC terms “identity management”).

By way of background, the FCC’s National Broadband Plan[2] sets various goals aimed at providing affordable broadband coverage to areas of the U.S. that go underserved in the current market, including homes, schools, hospitals and local government. The plan also focuses on improving public safety, both through expanding or enhancing broadband services, and promoting cybersecurity and the protection of critical broadband infrastructure. In this respect, the plan makes a number the recommendations, including the creation by the FCC of a “cybersecurity certification regime” and (in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security) “a cybersecurity information reporting system.” The depth and breadth of these recommendations appears to move the FCC closer to the regulation of data security, an area where activity at the federal level, at least with respect to consumers, has generally fallen under either the Justice Department through criminal investigations, or the FTC via enforcement actions and various other initiatives.

The letter goes on to emphasize some of the FTC’s more significant efforts in this regard, including a 2007 workshop on customer authentication technology and policy, followed by a 2008 report on the same topic, and most notably, the Commission’s enforcement action and $15 million settlement against ChoicePoint for failure to follow reasonable data protection procedures ,— the largest civil money penalty in FTC history. The letter also mentions some of the Commission’s more recent efforts to address privacy challenges surrounding cloud computing, including three roundtable forums on privacy in the age of cloud computing and social networking, the last of which took place in March of 2010.

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Is text-messaging protected against surveillance by an employer? Currently, it is if the employer is a governmental entity. But for how long? The Supreme Court recently agreed to review the Ninth Circuit’s panel opinion in Quon v. Arch Wireless, 529 F.3d 892 (9th Cir. 2008), cert. granted sub. nom. City of Ontario v. Quon, ___ U.S. ___, 130 S.Ct. 1011, 175 L.Ed.2d 617 (Dec. 14, 2009).

The central issue in Quon was whether a policeman who was issued a text message pager by the city for police business had a reasonable expectation that his personal messages sent over the pager would remain private. The city argued that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy in personal messages, because it had a written policy that personal use of city computer equipment and software for personal use was considered a violation of city policy, and that use of the Internet and the email system outside the course of business was expressly deemed not confidential. Quon had acknowledged in writing having read the policy. Quon had also been informed that text messages were considered email and would be subject to audit.

The Ninth Circuit disagreed and found Quon did have a reasonable expectation of privacy in personal messages, on the ground that the foregoing city policy was not actually followed. Officer Quon’s immediate superior had told Quon that, if Quon paid for overruns on his monthly allotment of characters, his text messages would not be audited. But in the fullness of time, Officer Quon’s messages were audited when he continued to exceed his monthly limit, and it was discovered that many of his text messages were personal. Officer Quon sued, alleging that the police department and City employees who reviewed the text messages violated Quon’s rights under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and similar provisions of the California constitution. The District Court and the Ninth Circuit found that Officer Quon was entitled to rely on his superior’s assurances that his text messages would remain private on the conditions stated.

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PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. — A student who set up a Facebook page to complain about her teacher – and was later suspended – had every right to do so under the First Amendment, a federal magistrate has ruled.

The ruling not only allows Katherine “Katie” Evans’ suit against the principal to move forward, it could set a precedent in cases involving speech and social networking on the Internet, experts say.

The courts are in the early stages of exploring the limits of free speech within social networking, said Howard Simon, the executive director of the Florida ACLU, which filed the suit on Evans’ behalf.

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A type of “driver’s license” for the Internet. Yeah. That’s what Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, proposed this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

It’s not as ominous as it sounds since Mundie was suggesting a simple solution for the complex world of cybercrime, and his analogy was a “driver’s license” for the Internet.

I wasn’t in Davos, so I’ll let Time magazine’s Barbara Kiviat explain it better:

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