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Corporate Identity Theft on the Rise
prostoalex writes "As millions of Americans lose their identities to online and offline thieves, a new kind of crime has been cooked up by the criminals who are not bothering with doing pesky credit card charges. They steal entire companies, opening up merchant accounts for existing businesses and running up charges from aforementioned stolen credit card numbers. What's worse, is that the hole the criminals exploit seems to be built into the system. According to Bob Sullivan from MSNBC, "Many of the processing firms interviewed for this article claimed they caught on to the fraud after the transactions had cleared, but before the suspects had withdrawn the money from various checking accounts around the country. One did concede, however, that the scheme has real potential.""
I wonder if Microsoft accepts credit cards.....
Ashton was quoted saying, "Dude where's my company."
I love these articles that outline great ways to break the law. Like the one a while back about how to open a kryptonite U-Lock with a pen. It used to be hard to come up with great criminal schemes...now you just have to watch the news.
And so - the Crimson Permanent Assurance was launched upon the high seas of international finance!
Problem is, they do target ma and pa businesses. Indeed, apparently their scheme only works if the victim does not yet have a merchant account on his own (or else the fraudulent account would be easily flagged as duplicate...). Thus the perfect victim is a company too small to be accepting credit cards. Sorry, Microsoft will unfortunately never be the target of these gentlemen;-(
You only use 2% of your DNA
...every time some "paranoid" person starts talking about security. You know who I'm talking about.
They're everywhere. Nobody thinks worrying about security is cool or fun, it seems like a waste of money, a sign of mental instability, even a kind of obsessive behavior.
Everyone much prefers to be surprised and wave their hands when things go wrong. "It's out of control. You can't stop hackers/criminals/etc."
People have a terrible problem understanding scale. Nobody understood at Microsoft that the computer wasn't a little house in the country where you could leave the doors unlocked so occupants wouldn't have to fumble with the keys. When engineers there raised the problems they were scoffed at, disciplined. "Keep your priorities straight. Don't be paranoid." Nobody got it when the first spam was sent and we were all outraged... "What's wrong with a little spam?" How about what's wrong with 300 spam a day? It's just the "logical conclusion" - which is not logical anymore to people who don't like to be bothered thinking deeply about their responsibilities.
The many systems our financial institutions use for identifying and tracking "consumers" are ridiculously insecure. And although the victims wail and now are allowed a few minutes a month to tell their horrible tails on 60 minutes, we as a whole seem determined to close our eyes and race grinning into the brick wall of scale again. How many hundreds of thousands of people have to have their lives ruined before colleges stop making everyone spout their social security number like it's their first name, and the mother's maiden name loses its appeal? How long before companies stop letting $5 an hour employees handle "meaningless" data (with literally no background checks or security controls) that is worth millions when properly exploited?
This is a cultural change we need to kick off. We need to take security seriously. It needs to become uncool to roll your eyes and mock the security expert.
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