Finjan, a data security services firm, reported today that more than 500 megabytes of stolen medical and business data and Social Security Numbers (SSNs) have been found on “crimeservers” in Malaysia and Argentina. The data were stolen from systems for a major airline and a health care provider using widely available hacker toolkits, [...]

It was inevitable, and now it’s “official”: the 2008 Economic Stimulus Payment is the new Nigerian scam.
A few of my clients this week reported receiving one or more phishing emails about the 2008 Economic Stimulus Payment from the US government. Then I received one myself this morning. (”Gee, how could the [...]

The ABA Journal is reporting another development in attorney-client privilege concerns with the booming legal outsourcing market. Here are the questions:
Does the monitoring of cross-border communications by the United States government under the Patriot Act and the Wiretapping Act and the lack of US constitutional protection in foreign countries violate an attorney’s duty to [...]

It will typically cost an identity thief around $2.99.
An article in today’s New York Times announced that researchers discovered that anyone can unlock data encryption on a PC hard drive merely by opening the case and blasting the chips with a can of compressed air, causing the data to remain in memory, allowing easy access [...]

Privacy advocates have just established a noncommercial website that allowing visitors to request their FBI Files, as well as files from several other governmental agencies.
http://www.GetMyFBIfile.com

Here’s an interesting article on identity theft and social security earnings that was passed to me by a colleague. According to the article, the IRS, the Social Security Administration (SSA), and the Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS - formerly the INS) all collect information about double and multiple uses of the same social security [...]

This week, the Michigan Supreme Court upheld a 1996 never-enforced voter ID law, which requires Michigan voters to produce valid photo IDs in order to vote. The law has been the subject of controversy on both privacy and economic grounds — privacy advocates condemn any linking of basic constitutional rights and liberties with identification [...]

I recently answered a commonly-asked question about the legalities of forwarding email. Forwarding email is very easy to do; the user just clicks on a button and types in an address and the entire email is sent off into cyberspace to another reader. As any user of the Internet knows — this is, [...]

If you ask me, this is the Mother Of All Privacy Violations. My tax return data?

The IRS has proposed a rule to allow the tax preparation industry to disclose Joe American’s tax return information, collected while preparing returns for consumers, to third parties. Of course, this is only after they have received your [...]

A federal trial court in Chicago ruled that the ancient legal doctrine of trespass to chattels (trespassing on personal property, rather than on someone’s land or real estate) may potentially apply to spyware on your computer.
The Chicago Lawsuit
In Sotelo v. DirectRevenue, the computer owner filed a complaint against various companies alleging that they caused spyware [...]