The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and India are now planning to ban Blackberrys in their countries. The Blackberry service uses encrypted connections between devices and the email and web browsing service, which are operated from North America. The above countries have a policy of monitoring the email, messaging and browsing of their citizens, and even of foreign visitors to those countries.

It seems that RIM, the maker of Blackberry, is looking to add security back-doors so that governments in these countries can spy on Blackberry users in those areas.

Facebook takes on the issue is the data that was scraped wasn’t private at all. To a degree, I agree. The data is being shared through the site, it’s already public.

Here’s how it went down: a good guy hacker developed a program that went through all 500 million profiles and was able to skim (scrape) all the data from Facebook that wasn’t locked down via the users Facebook privacy settings. Basically if you didn’t lock your privacy settings down, it’s now available in this file. If you lock down your settings today, it’s still in this file.

What’s the point? Hackers like to tinker, and some like to make a point. It seems the ha

Full Article…

It’s summer time and the living is easy – especially if you’re on vacation. The last thing you need is to worry about fraud, but it happens. A purse is snatched, a credit card is compromised, a passport is lost.

We know readers of this blog are sophisticated when it comes to security, but we thought it wouldn’t hurt to share some of these tips from Intersections and ITAC about making your vacation a safe one:

• Protect your home from burglars and identity thieves before you leave. Have yo

Full Article…

Welcome to the “Best Person of the Week” post from the ITAC blog. As our ever faithful readers know, we like to shine a light on the identity theft “heroes” who are fighting the most noble battle against identity theft. And, our readers know that we like to mix things up a bit, which is what we are doing with this week’s “Best Person” post. How are we mixing things up? We are focusing on a victim who needs all the publicity he can get to clear his good name.

Here’s the gist of it. When Dan Wheele

Full Article…

A recent news report of a skimming scam in Long Island, N.Y., netted thieves more than $200,000 from ATMs at five branches.

Skimming today is far more sophisticated than in the past. Skimmers can include blue tooth and texting technology that send the data to the criminal anywhere. Keypads can be compromised by devices that overlay the exiting pad and transfer the data remotely.

ATM scams and fraud go beyond skimming to crimes that are very physical such as ram raiding to remote malicious software hacks.

Bankinfosecurity.com published “7 Growing Threats to Financial Institutions”.

#1 Skimming; Hardware readily available online that is attached to the face of ATM records user card information and pin codes. In

Full Article…

You have to give cybercriminals credit. When it comes to computer crimes, they can be quite ingenious. Identity thieves are constantly developing new ways to steal your personal information or improving their methods. Such is the case with keystroke logging.

Fortunately for us, the good guys, and unfortunately for them, the bad guys, most of their attempts are detectable. That is, if you know what you’re looking for. Here’s help.

Understanding Keystroke Logging

Perry Kivolowitz, an American computer scientist, authored one of the first keylogger programs in 1983.

Full Article…