Thursday, March 09, 2006
Privacy: 17 million potentially embarrassing records leaked
So you protect your credit card information. Are the organizations you give it to equally careful? How 'bout the organizations they pass it along to?
A company called iBill, in the business of taking credit card info from web sites and handling the Visa/Mastercard billing in exchange for a cut of the revenue, lost control of the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of seventeen million web site customers. In case you haven't heard of iBill, it turns out they specialized in handling billing for porn websites.
No credit card numbers lost, as far as anyone knows. Security people who've looked at the size and format of the stolen information say it looks like an inside job.
More details in the Wired article about the iBill privacy breach.
How to protect yourself? It's tempting to say "What do you expect? Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas". The "adult" website industry isn't the only place with crooks but seems to have more than its share. But that's not an answer, since this could have happened anywhere. We may need to resort to national privacy legislation to control problems like this one.
UPDATE 3/10/2006:
iBill says the leaked records didn't and couldn't have come from them.
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A company called iBill, in the business of taking credit card info from web sites and handling the Visa/Mastercard billing in exchange for a cut of the revenue, lost control of the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of seventeen million web site customers. In case you haven't heard of iBill, it turns out they specialized in handling billing for porn websites.
No credit card numbers lost, as far as anyone knows. Security people who've looked at the size and format of the stolen information say it looks like an inside job.
More details in the Wired article about the iBill privacy breach.
How to protect yourself? It's tempting to say "What do you expect? Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas". The "adult" website industry isn't the only place with crooks but seems to have more than its share. But that's not an answer, since this could have happened anywhere. We may need to resort to national privacy legislation to control problems like this one.
UPDATE 3/10/2006:
iBill says the leaked records didn't and couldn't have come from them.
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