Posted 8:42 AM (0) comments

Hackers broke into a 3rd party credit card transaction processing center (System break-in nets info on 5.6 million credit cards) and retrieved millions of account numbers. Its unclear if names were associated with the numbers. What is clear, though, is that at least one bank lied to the reporter:

"Citizens Bank was notified of the crime by MasterCard on Friday and immediately canceled the affected credit cards to protect its customers"

The customers were already protected by laws limiting their liability. The bank was acting to prevent its own losses at the possible cost of great inconvenience to its customers. That's one bank I'll stay away from.

(Also, please note that no "identity theft" is involved, but this incident will certainly show up in reviews of other identity theft stories!)

Posted 10:50 AM (0) comments

Information Security magazine focused on Identity Management in the April, 2002 issue (April 2002 - What is Identity Management?). The top concern, at least by its prominence in the article, is self-service password reset for users. The other major uses of ID Mgmt packages are Password Synchronization, Single SignOn and Everything Else (lumped as "Access Management"). See why I keep saying the security people just don't get it?