A new research report titled “Protecting Personal Information: We Lost the Battle, Can We Win the War?” by TowerGroup,  declares that the financial services industry has lost the battle to protect consumers’ personally identifiable information (PII) data.
TowerGroup’s George Tubin points out that “in light of the loss or theft of hundreds of millions of data [...]

Deteriorating financial conditions in 2008 coupled with the emergence of new payments types and the growth of electronic payments opened up new opportunities for payment fraud, according to the 2009 Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) Payments and Fraud Control Survey.
According to AFP, “the assault on payments is widespread: over seventy percent of organizations surveyed experienced [...]

Visa recently held a Global Security Summit at which, Visa chief enterprise risk officer Ellen Richey told security experts today that payment card data fraud rates remain near historic lows despite economic woes and high-profile compromises.
She said the situation called for continued industry investment, collaboration and innovation, three key components in keeping the electronic payment [...]

DCexaminer.com, the online presence of the Washington Examiner, have reported that Montgomery County police are seeking to have eBay sellers and particularly eBay Trading Assistants registered in the same way as pawn brokers, with sellers being required to report their offered items to police then hold them for a minimum of 18 days.
Under the proposals, [...]

eWeek’s Roy Mark has written an article that reveals three law propositions first tabled last year, and ridiculed, have been put back on the table for consideration.  Cumulatively they represent another round of guilty until proven innocent legislation that makes ebay’s VeRO system look like organised playground fisticuffs.
Superficially the intent of the proposals are honourable [...]

The biggest data breach ever disclosed was announced on Tuesday, January 20th.
A major payment processor, which claims that 40% of their processed transactions are from restaurants across the USA, admitted that tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions were compromised.
This data breach disclosure event follows two other data breach events, in 2008, [...]

January 2009 is US Financial Awareness Month according to an email newsletter received this week from online Identity Protection company TrustedID.
I knew there was a reason that our own Sunday Papers week-end magazine has been so finance heavy this month – the email received today gives me the nudge as to why.  I’ll also be [...]

Source: European Co-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST)
Press release published Thursday, 18 December, 2008
An international research project into cyber-bullying being co-ordinated at Goldsmiths, University of London, could pave the way for new European guidelines on the issue.
The European Co-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST) has launched a [...]

There’s a new type of phishing email doing the rounds, and it’s targeting website owners.
It purports to be from the “enom Team” and offers a link to www.enom.com that behind the link connects to ” www.enom.com.sys43.ru ” and obviously has nothing to do with the real enom.com
enom.com are one of the UK’s primary internet domain [...]

All of which leads to the question, “Is this geo-specific lock-out the result of too many eBay refugees dragging with them to eBid, their constant xenophobic moaning about Oriental vendors and the Eastern pricing they cannot compete with?”

Worryingly, forwarding the phishing mails to spoof@moneybookers.com resulted in a bounced email with an http 5.x.x error advising they don’t accept direct emails and all communication must be through the contact page inside the site. This represents a cavalier attitude to fraud prevention and prosecution in my estimation.

Inexperienced users shouldn’t confuse phishing emails with “spam” – unsolicited commercial email – a high percentage of spam is from genuine traders attempting to minimise marketing costs, although a large amount is still designed to part you from your money without providing what you thought you were buying.

Concerns about border security and terrorism drive government surveillance initiatives, says report
from ASSOCIATED PRESS
LONDON – Individual privacy is under threat in the United States and across the European Union as governments introduce sweeping surveillance and information-gathering measures in the name of security and border control, an international rights group said in a report.  Greece, Romania [...]