Monday, May 12, 2014

Quick Round-up of Some of the Latest Tricks and Traps

Beware of new scams and privacy pitfalls

New ways to fool people out of their money, information and identities pop up nearly every day. Here's a quick round up of some of the latest tricks and traps:

New Scam Targets Homeless: Fraudsters pay homeless people to take out cell phone contracts in their names. The fraudsters keep the phones, rack up the bills and then sell the phones, ruining the homeless person's credit.

Getty Images Allows Free Embedding, but at What Cost to Privacy? People can embed images in their sites for free, so long as they use the provided embed code and iframe. Because of the scope of Gettys' reach, this may allow the company to correlate more information about a user's browsing history than any single site could. Just another reminder that nothing's truly free in this world!

Human Error Tops Ponemon Patient Data Security Study Threats: 75 percent of healthcare organizations view employee negligence as the greatest data breach threat. This result underscores the importance of good security and privacy controls (and excellent employee training!) in healthcare environments. This extends to medical device manufacturers, who often work off very old technology software and continue to insist that controls are too cost-prohibitive.

The Data Brokers - Selling Your Personal Information: 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft recently reported on his investigation of the multibillion dollar industry that collects, analyzes and sells the personal information of millions of Americans with virtually no oversight.

No comments: