Americans are shopping online at record levels — thanks to Covid-19…and with all that flurry of activity, criminals have flocked to e-commerce, too. Julie Ferguson, CEO of the Merchant Risk Council, talked to me recently about why online credit card fraud and other kinds of fraud seem to be spreading [Keep reading]
If you’ve ever wondered how your local police department ended up with military HUMVEES, visit The Marshall Project. There, you can click on your community and see if has been was the recipient of a Pentagon surplus program known as “1033.” Since the late 1990s — when signed into law [Keep reading]
With President Donald Trump threatening retribution against Twitter with an executive order, you’re going to hear a lot about Section 230 this week — and maybe for many weeks. The ensuing discussion could shake the Internet to its very roots. That’s going to make legal scholars very happy, but it [Keep reading]
Scattered Canary sounds a bit like bad band name from high school, but it’s really the name given to a highly organized cybercrime game base in Nigeria that’s managed to steal millions of dollars from state unemployment systems, according to my guest — Armen Najarian is Chief Identity Officer [Keep reading]
Imagine applying for unemployment benefits only to be denied because…you are already receiving them. Or getting a letter saying you’ve applied for unemployment when you still have a job. It’s happening to ID theft victims around the country as organized crime rings exploit a “perfect storm” that matches a [Keep reading]
“We are being robbed…our intellectual property is all the U.S. has left, and we are being fleeced of it.” The news was easily lost in the Covid-19 fray, but earlier this year, U.S. authorities blamed China for what many consider the most important data heist in history — the hack [Keep reading]
Amy Boyer, I sometimes say, was the first person murdered by the Internet. Twenty years ago this fall, she was gunned down in cold blood by stalker Liam Youens. He found Amy by hiring a data broker, and told everyone about that on his website. “It’s actually obscene what you [Keep reading]
Dan Solove, perhaps the leading legal scholar on privacy, has an amazing collection of magazine covers on his TechPrivacy.com website. One after another, they all lament that “Privacy is Dead.” The stories date from 2015….2010…1994…..1970! He calls this collection “the undying death of privacy.” “I am growing weary of [Keep reading]
The third episode of our privacy podcast, No Place to Hide, goes right to a pretty dark place. When they take away our privacy, what are they really taking away? Our humanity. Menny Barzily, CTO of the Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center at Tel-Aviv University, offered the most profound analysis. He [Keep reading]
Peer-to-peer payment app Venmo has long told users not to use the service to pay strangers for goods or services. That appears to be changing. The service has quietly added a feature it’s calling the “Venmo Purchase Program.” For a hefty, optional 3% non-refundable fee, which can be added on [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan