Free Republic

Survey finds one in six consumers act on spam by Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service About one in six consumers have at some time acted on a spam message, affirming the economic incentive for spammers to keep churning out millions of obnoxious pitches per day, according to a new survey.Due to be released Wednesday, the survey was sponsored by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), an industrywide security think tank composed of service providers and network operators dedicated to fighting spam and malicious software.Eight hundred consumers in the U.S. and Canada were asked about their computer security practices habits...

AN OHIO state IT worker will lose a week of vacation time over a lost backup tape, writes ComputerWorld. The tape, containing Social Security numbers and other personal data on over 100,000 current and past state employees and taxpayers, was stolen last June from an intern's car. Jerry Miller, an ERP project payroll team leader for the Ohio Administrative Knowledge System (OAKS), was held responsible for not ensuring the security of the data on the tape. His penalty, suggested by a state Office of Collective Bargaining worker, will be the loss of one week of future vacation time. Reportedly the...

A backup drive gone missing leads the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to start its second investigation into the practices of one of the country's largest financial institutions. The bank explains its crisis management strategy. CIBC is facing an investigation by federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart’s office following the loss of a backup drive containing personal and financial data on 470,000 customers of its subsidiary Talvest Mutual Funds. The bank said it had no reason to believe information on the drive, which went missing while in transit between two offices, had been inappropriately accessed so far. The drive contained client names,...

If anyone has sympathy for TJX Companies Inc. in the wake of a massive data breach that may have exposed the credit card data of millions of customers, they're not expressing it in the blogosphere. The Framingham, Mass.-based retail giant acknowledged that an attacker exploited a flaw in a portion of TJX's computer network that handles credit card, debit card, check, and merchandise return transactions for customers of its T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods and A.J. Wright stores in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and its Winners and HomeSense stores in Canada. The intrusion may involve customers of its T.K. Maxx...