A federal indictment announced on Thursday against four Russians and a Ukrainian man casts new light on some of the biggest breaches of payment card data in recent years. The defendants, affiliated with notorious computer hacker Albert Gonzalez, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence but named as one of …

A formerly obscure lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission against Wyndham Worldwide Corp. and three subsidiaries in the wake of three data breaches at the hotel chain has become the flashpoint of a growing debate about the lack of a federal law governing data security on the Internet and …

Why Is First Data Dissing PayPal POS? Discover Financial Services has recruited 50 merchant acquirers to bring acceptance of leading online payment system PayPal to more than 2 million physical merchant locations by year’s end. Still holding out, at least as late as late May, was No. 1 merchant processor …

Elizabeth Whalen While the data are mixed about ACH fraud, what banks and companies can do to keep it under control is quite clear. Recent data give mixed signals about automated clearing house fraud as the number of ACH transactions and the number and types of ACH originators grows. A …

  n In the case of some merchants, a high rate of PIN acceptance is already controlling fraud, the merchants said. “Our actual fraud rate is so small it’s hardly worth mentioning,” said Gavin Waugh, vice president and assistant treasurer at Wendy’s International Inc. “[EMV] doesn’t move the needle that …

  Financially motivated cybercrime accounted for 75% of data breaches in 2012, with state-affiliated espionage campaigns aimed at stealing intellectual property ranking second at 20%, according to the Verizon 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report released on Tuesday. In 2012, breaches affecting financial organizations accounted for 37% of the total, followed …

  Like metastatic cancer, the cyberattacks originating from ordinary hackers all the way up to national governments seem to be getting worse by the day, according to security experts who spoke Wednesday to a conference of e-commerce executives. Case in point: last week, citizens of South Korea couldn’t use banks …

E-commerce, better malware, and mobile devices are on the minds of fraudsters, according to Trustwave Holdings Inc.’s latest annual data-breach study. Chicago-based Trustwave, a leading data-forensics investigator and security vendor, based its report on 450 data breaches it investigated last year around the world. Hackers targeted payment card data in …

Linda Punch Hobbled by limited resources and other handicaps, government units are struggling to combat a rising onslaught from online data thieves. When news of a data breach hits the national headlines, it usually involves retailers, processors, and others in the private sector. But government entities from park districts and …

  n The report, which covers the third quarter of last year, documents a steady decline in both the number of unique sites hosting phishing attacks and the volume of reported attacks. The number of phishing sites detected by the APWG fell in step-like fashion from 63,253 in April to …