So when are corporations and government agencies going to stop letting employees running around with laptop computers that contain the personal information that belong to other people?
In another recent blunder involving a Connecticut state employee, a laptop computer was stolen from a car belonging to a state tax department employee. Oh great, it’s not enough [...]

Now this should make you sleep better at night: In a recent audit, almost 60 percent of IRS employees that were targeted disclosed their computer access information to an auditor who was using ’social engineering’ techniques in an attempt to extract information from the employee.
Social engineering is different from so many of the high-profile [...]

It appears that two low-life corrections officers in Maryland demonstrated yet another innovative way to steal identities.
The Baltimore corrections officers were stealing credit cards belonging to the prisoners at Baltimore’s central lock-up! Look ma, another case of identity theft that does not involve computers or the Internet!
The crooked corrections officers apparently had a grand [...]

I’m beginning to see a trend here: State governments are hiring idiots to run various web sites and other supposedly ‘internal’ systems.
The problem is the increasing number of cases where data that is supposed to be accessible only on internal systems is showing up on the Internet for anyone to access.
Yesterday I posted about the Louisiana [...]

This time it’s the Louisiana Board of Regents — an organization that oversees the state’s institutions of higher education — that has managed to expose personal information belonging to some 80,000 individuals to just about anyone who was able to stumble across it.
Although the information was part of an internal web site, the data was available to just [...]

Another insider was unable to resist the temptation to take advantage of his access to reams of personal information and sold the information belonging to 2.3 million consumers to a data broker, who then sold it to marketing companies.
A senior database administrator a subsidiary of Fidelity National Information Services stands accused of swiping the information [...]

In yet another case of it-didn’t-happen-because-of-the-Internet Identity theft, an Oklahoma identity theft ring has been put out of business by law enforcement authorities.
This gang had an interesting and quite low-tech approach when it came to gathering information on their potential victims. They simply cruised through neighborhoods and wrote down addresses of homes where they thought [...]

The state of Ohio seems to be taking steps to improve its electronic security. With two recent security incidents involving personal data being lost by state employees or contractors, state officials must be feeling the heat these days.
The latest news is that the state is working on a project to remove all social security numbers [...]

Here’s another case of identity theft where the required information was obtained by the crook through more traditional means and had nothing to do with computers or the Internet.
A 47-year-old nurse in Charlottesville, Virginia was arrested and charged with stealing the identity of an elderly woman and then racking up $10,000 in debt buying jewelry, [...]

It seems that teens are becoming popular targets for online identity thieves. Kids these days are growing up online. As I type this, my two teenage sons are busy entertaining themselves with online multi-player games. Something they spend far too much time doing in my opinion.
Despite their tech savvy, today’s teens are falling victim to [...]