Cybercriminals have stolen a staggering amount of information from government computers, a federal agency revealed Thursday. The total number of victims and the type of information gathered, taken together, make the hack historic. While researching an attack that saw the compromise of 4.5 million federal workers’ data, the Office of Personal [Keep reading]
Chaos was having a very good day and IT departments a very bad day on Wednesday. First, passengers around the country were stranded — many still are — after United Airlines issued a ground stop for all flights. Then, at nearly the same time United announced its systems had been fixed, [Keep reading]
UPDATED: Third party blamed for unauthorized access. Some Expedia.com customers are getting emails from the firm warning that a would-be criminal has obtained “unauthorized access … (to) your name, phone number, email address and travel booking.” The details are being used in an attempt to trick customers into sharing even more [Keep reading]
Can someone cash a check you’ve written more than once? Yes, thanks to the intersection of very old and very new banking technology. Impossible until recently – payees formerly were required to hand paper checks over to banks during a deposit – some experts predict “double presentment” will be the [Keep reading]
Among all the things that Washington D.C. has done in the past few decades, you’d be hard pressed to find anything more popular than the Do Not Call List. It had a rocky beginning — birthing took about a decade — but it worked remarkably well, as federal programs go, and [Keep reading]
First of all, if you haven’t read it, you must: The FBI is investigating baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals for hacking the Houston Astros, according to the New York Times. Someone from the Cardinals allegedly stole data offering insight into the Astros player evaluation files, details on possible trades, and so on. This [Keep reading]
Consumers hate passwords, and they are notoriously bad at choosing good ones. Today, the only alternative to being a memorization genius or re-using passwords is to use password management software that remembers all your well-crafted logins for you. It has risks, too — putting all those keys in one place [Keep reading]
The Federal Communications Commission sent a letter to PayPal on Thursday that was highly critical of the firm’s robocalling and robotexting fine print, which I first chronicled earlier this month. The letter says PayPal’s terms of service “raise serious concerns for the (FCC) enforcement bureau.” In a report for Credit.com last [Keep reading]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — If power corrupts, does technological power corrupt absolutely? At an intimate workshop in Georgetown this week, just a quick Uber ride from the Halls of American power, discussion turned to a different power struggle — parents vs. teen-agers. Some of the brightest minds in the world are here to discuss the fragility of the life in [Keep reading]
For the second time in the past 12 months, the agency that acts as the human resources department for federal employees has been hacked. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management said on Thursday that it would be notifying 4 million current and former federal employees that hackers may have stolen their [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan