Privacy experts: T.J. Maxx breach was foreseeable

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Byron Acohido: Zero Day Threat

Byron Acohido, the USA Today Pulitzer prize author, is pushing a book right now, involving this topic - see zerodaythreat.com. I asked him if he had researched the Patty Dunn identity theft case and he had not. But he did give me an ear full along the lines of T.J Maxx. The book will be called

Zero Day Threat: The Shocking Truth of How Banks and Credit Card Companies Help Cyber Crooks Steal Your Money and Identity

The data that is harvested is used in a variety of ways often involving gift cards and Web 2.0 based purchases and this has been going on for many years with the financial industry working to suppress public knowledge of the problem. Banks like Patty Dunn's Barclay Bank even make money on the fraud by selling insurance and account monitoring services.

The worst part about the financial industry is that operatives often will pay off the victims in a covert manner that requires the victims to not report the fraud to police authorities. They do this so that they can present to government officials data indicating a much smaller problem than it really is. My sense from Byron is that this is a huge problem in the EU countries where there is a Russian Business Service in Saint Petersburg that caters to criminal mobsters wishing to take "low hanging fruit" involving identity theft that will set them up with the servers and a turn key system to do so.

Today the US Federal Government is so influenced by the multinational big financial institutions (read investors) that they are not expected to do anything about it. Curiously California, the same state that let Patty Dunn off the hook, is one of the leading states supposidly doing something about it. I wonder now if she were let off owing to her sitting on a Barclay Bank Global Investors board of directors as well as on the HP board. This is a potential Euro killer. The Rock Bank 2.0.

To illustrate. Purchase a 10 buck gift card, encode it with data harvested and purchased from a variety of sources, and turn it into a 400 buck gift card. Go to Harods, buy stuff, sell it on Ebay.

In the USA, Byron Acohido believes there is a databank of about 1 million Social Security Numbers that can be purchased but he thinks Patty Dunn would have to have had insider knowledge, like you might get through a financial institution like Barclays, in order to steel the identities of the Cnet Reporters and Nuclear Lab employees.

On an uplifting note. US consumers are protected, according to Acohido, when they use Visa credit cards that give Alaska airline millage. He declined to explain why but did recommend destroying cash cards. And he advised me to avoid using Microsoft's browser. He recommends Firefox. Again no explanation. Lets have more on this topic. It appears to be a breaking story about to rock Europe.

Frank L. Mighetto CCP

Posted by: mighetto   Posted on: 09/26/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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