Security

Can you discern a fake e-mail from a legitimate one? Most consumers can't, but erroneously think they can, according to a new study by Bank of America and National Cyber Security Alliance, a copy of which was provided to the E-Commerce Times. The survey showed that 87 percent of consumers polled sai...

E-commerce is alive and well. Holiday shopping sales were through the virtual roof last season and analysts predict continued growth in the online channel in 2006. There's only one problem: Security threats seem to be rising almost as quickly as e-shopping revenues. From phishing to pharming to hack...

What's the best way to reduce the risk of ID theft? Though it sounds counter-intuitive, would you believe that using the Internet more often does just that? A new survey by Javelin Research & Strategy indicates that those who pay their bills online have a lower likelihood of having their identit...

The Internet is still a very dangerous environment for conducting business. Lurking in the cyberspace shadows are criminal masterminds bent on stealing personal information and credit card numbers to further fund their activities. Almost daily, stories involving new worms, phishing scams or large s...

In a case that emphasizes the myriad ways for digital data to be compromised, files containing information on some 26.5 million U.S. veterans were taken from the home of a government employee during a burglary. The Department of Veterans Affairs announced the breach Monday, but said there was no ev...

President Bush this week created an "ID theft prevention" task force by executive order, and Internet security executives are reacting positively, if cautiously, to the new federal initiative. "This task force should help improve coordination among federal, state and local authorities. It's a positi...

The associations representing movie studios and music labels are warning some 40 college presidents that their students are using their high-powered networks to steal copyrighted entertainment and urging them to take "immediate action." The Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Pi...

The White House and the Pentagon aren't the only government agencies embracing public key infrastructure -- encryption -- for Internet security. State agencies in Illinois, and other states, like Virginia, are as well, and, in a twist, they are now farming out the management of the services to third...

For anglers, spring is a time for removing the rod and reel from storage and heading to a lake or stream. For phishers of another kind, however, spring is the season for tax scams. Phishing -- the use of phony e-mails and Web sites to obtain personal information about people -- has become such a pro...

Based on interviews with 40,000 American residents, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has reported that 3.6 million -- or about 3 out of every 100 -- households were victimized by perpetrators of identity theft between July and December 2004. The numbers differ from earlier research findings and sugge...

Microsoft has announced the repackaging of four hosted solutions from FrontBridge Technologies, a company that it bought in August 2005, as well as a new licensing model and road map for Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services. The rebranding comes as no surprise, said Joe Wilcox, senior analyst with Jup...

In the wake of a string of high profile data breaches reported by banks, retailers and credit card companies, a U.S. House panel on Thursday approved a bill drafted to protect consumers from identity theft and credit card fraud. The House Financial Services Committee cleared the Financial Data Prote...

Three computer researchers created a stir Wednesday when they released a paper at a conference in Pisa, Italy, describing how to infect Radio Frequency Identification tags with a computer virus, but the likelihood of a digital disease rampaging through the world's supply chains is slim, at least for...

For years, the vast majority of purchases made from e-commerce sites have relied on the same technology to keep them safe and protect consumers from identity theft. Secure socket layer, or SSL, has helped complete millions of Web transactions, often working without consumers knowing it. When an SSL ...

In the past, cyber attacks were largely designed to destroy data, but today's attacks are increasingly designed to silently steal data for profit without doing system damage that would be noticeable to a user, according to the latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report. Symantec released on Tue...