By: Chris Merritt - Dir. Solutions Marketing
ZIP Codes Are … PII?!
April 15th, 2013
Mr. ZIP (or Zippy to his friends) was born back in July 1963 and the soon-to-be 50-year-old is finally getting some privacy … in Massachusetts at least. The Massachusetts Supreme Court recently determined that under Mass. Gen. Laws, ch. 93, § 105(a), “personal identification information” includes a consumer’s ZIP code and decided that collecting such [...]
By: Chris Merritt - Dir. Solutions Marketing
Uncle Sam Has Yet Another Data Protection Bill
June 25th, 2012
The latest attempt at creating a US Federal data protection / data breach notification law was recently introduced in the Senate. The “Data Security and Breach Notification Act of 2012” (S.3333) was submitted by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) with the support of Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Jim DeMint (R-SC), Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Dean Heller [...]
By: Chris Merritt - Dir. Solutions Marketing
Change Your LinkedIn Password – Now!
June 6th, 2012
LinkedIn – the online professional networking site which I suspect many Optimal Security blog readers use – has apparently been hacked, resulting in something like 6.5M SHA-1 hashed passwords being posted in a Russian hacker site. This evolving situation will certainly be updated through-out the day (and beyond), so I don’t want to recap the [...]
By: Chris Merritt - Dir. Solutions Marketing
Illinois’ New Data Protection Law
August 24th, 2011
News today, courtesy of Brendon Tavelli at Proskauer’s Privacy Law blog via the always excellent Office of Inadequate Security, of a new data breach notification bill just signed by Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois. Interesting to me both personally (Go Illini!!) and professionally, this bill (HB 3025) amends Illinois Public Act 097-0483 (the Personal Information Protection [...]
Key Steps to Navigate Around New Facebook Privacy Settings
January 4th, 2010
What’s all the fuss about the latest changes on Facebook? Simply put, the changes mean that nearly everything that you place on your Facebook page can now potentially be made available to anyone surfing the Internet. The latest Facebook changes are purported to be an enhancement to make the social networking site easier for people who are looking [...]
By: Chris Merritt - Dir. Solutions Marketing
Don’t Procrastinate on Red Flags Rule Compliance Despite Latest Delay
November 18th, 2009
So, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has, for the fourth time (!) delayed enforcement of the so-called “Red Flags” rules, according to a statement posted on the agency’s website. Compliance enforcement is now scheduled for June 1, 2010 –- in case you’re keeping score at home, the previous dates were 01-Nov-08 (original), 01-May-09 (first delay), [...]
Sesame Street Simple Facebook Guide to Surviving Malicious Attacks
October 30th, 2009
It certainly seems that not a week goes by without hearing about yet another attack on Facebook users. Last week it was a phishing scam driven by a botnet, and this week, we have two new and different phishing scams — one cleverly tricking users into revealing their passwords and another installing malware that quietly [...]
By: Chris Merritt - Dir. Solutions Marketing
Where the Money Is
June 8th, 2009
Willie Sutton is reputed to have said (although he didn’t, actually), when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is.” So, we’re not really surprised to learn that a new scam is on to liberate the contents of ATMs, and by more sophisticated means than the skimmers I’ve written about previously. Nope, [...]
By: Chris Merritt - Dir. Solutions Marketing
Beware of ATM Card Skimmers
May 5th, 2009
I ran across an interesting post in the Consumerist about a guy who found a card skimmer attached to his local ATM. Apparently, he was alert enough to notice that something wasn’t quite right, and pulled it right off the machine … and discovered that it was designed to read the info off a card [...]
By: Paul Zimski - IT Security Expert
Healthcare 2.0? The Security Skinny on Obama’s Stimulus Package
March 31st, 2009
On Tuesday February 17th, President Obama signed the economic stimulus package that carves out $19B for modernizing health information systems. The transition from paper to electronic or e-records in the healthcare industry has been happening for some time. Although in small numbers, the process has been slow to ramp up based on technology considerations and [...]
FREE Scanner
Free eBook
Over 80% of IT Directors say that mobile devices represent a security threat.
