Financial Cryptography

Mad March of Disclosures - the post-Choicepoint world

Until recently, security breaches were generally hushed up. A California law (SB1386) to notify victims of losses of identity information came into effect mid 2002, which had the effect of springing a mandated leak in the secrecy of breaches across corporate and government USA.

At first a steady trickle of smaller breaches garnered minor press attention. Then Choicepoint burst into the public consciousness in February of 2005 due to several factors. This major breach caused not only a major dip in the company's share price, but also triggered the wave of similar revelations (see ID theft is inescapable below for a long list).

Such public exposure of breaches is unprecedented. Either we have just observed a spike in actual breaches and this is truly Mad March, or the breaches are normal, but the disclosure is abnormal.

Anecdotal evidence in the security industry supports the latter theory. (One example.) We've always known that massive breaches were happening, as stories have persistently circulated in security circles ever since companies started hooking databases to Internet servers. I feel pretty darn safe in putting the finger on SB1386 and Choicepoint as having changed the way things are now done (and, not to forget Schechter and Smith's FC03 paper which argued for more disclosure).

(Editorial note: this is posted because I need a single reference to the list of disclosures, rather than a squillion URLs. As additional disclosures come in I might simply add them to the list. For a comprehensive list of posts, see Adam's Choicepoint category. Adam also points at David Fraser's list of privacy incidents. And another list.)

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ID theft is inescapable

By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Published Wednesday 23rd March 2005 12:29 GMT

March 2005 might make history as the apex of identity theft disclosures. Privacy invasion outfit ChoicePoint, payroll handler PayMaxx, Bank of America, Lexis Nexis, several universities, and a large shoe retailer called DSW all lost control of sensitive data concerning millions of people.

Credit card and other banking details, names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth have fallen into the hands of potential identity thieves. The news could not be worse.

In March 2005 alone:

California State University at Chico notified 59,000 students, faculty, and staff that their details had been kept on a computer compromised by remote intruders. The haul included names, addresses and Social Security numbers.

Boston College notified 120,000 of its alumni after a computer containing their addresses and Social Security numbers were compromised by an intruder.

Shoe retailer DSW notified more than 100,000 customers of a remote break-in of the company's computerized database of 103 of the chain's 175 stores.

Privacy invasion outfit Seisint, a contributor to the MATRIX government dossier system, now owned by Reed Elsiver, confessed to 32,000 individuals that its Lexis Nexis databases had been compromised.

Privacy invasion outfit ChoicePoint confessed to selling the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of more than 150,000 people to criminals.

Bank of America confessed to losing backup tapes containing the financial records of 1.2 million federal employees.

Payroll outsourcer PayMaxx foolishly exposed more than 25,000 of its customers' payroll records on line.

Desktop computers belonging to government contractor Science Applications International Corp (SAIC) were stolen, exposing the details of stockholders past and present, many of them heavy hitters in the US government, such as former Defense Secretaries William Perry and Melvin Laird, former CIA Director John Deutch, former CIA Deputy Director Bobby Ray Inman, former Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq David Kay, and former chief counter-terror advisor General Wayne Downing.

Cell phone provider T-Mobile admitted that an intruder gained access to 400 of its customers' personal information.

George Mason University confessed that a remote intruder had gained access to the personal records of 30,000 students, faculty, and staff.

To which we can add:Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Nevada's Department of Motor Vehicles, legal data collector Westlaw, University of Nevada , University of California, Berkeley.

Posted by iang at March 28, 2005 11:34 AM | TrackBack