Hacker caught with 675K credit card accounts

Incredible:

A computer hacker from Georgia pleaded guilty Thursday to fraud and identity theft after authorities found more than 675,000 stolen credit card accounts on his home computers.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110421/ap_on_re_us/us_credit_card_hacker

Largest Data Breach in Texas

Are you a Teacher in TX? Claimed Unemployment in TX? Retired Texas State Employee?
Then if you are one of this subset of 3.5 Million people, you should already know about this:
http://www.txsafeguard.org/110411-security.php

Epsilon Data Breach called "The single largest criminal act in history"

Spear-phishing is perhaps responsible for Epsilon leak.
I cover that topic in class.

Here are some sources regarding the Epsilon Data Breach of from http://www.thesilentcrime.com

The world’s largest “permissions-based” e-mail marketing company, Epsilon, reported late last week that someone hacked into its computer system and stole an unknown number of e-mail addresses and names.

According to Professor Steffen Schmidt, Iowa State University, “This is probably the single largest criminal act in history since this company potentially has compromised the recipients on the 40 BILLION or so e-mails they send out each year.”

Epsilon should have seen this coming since Nov 2010... http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9215605/Epsilon_a_victim_of_spear_phishing_attack_says_report?taxonomyId=82

Computerworld - The massive data breach at email service provider Epsilon may have been caused by a targeted spear-phishing campaign that the company should have known about for at least four months, Australian newspaper ITNews reported today.

Congress apparently wants more information on this incident as well.

How would your company respond to a similar request or one from local law enforcement or the State Attorney General?
http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2011/04/house-lawmakers-want-info-abou.php

The leaders of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee want some answers from the company that was hit by a data breach last week that involved the loss of data about customers of some of the nation's biggest banks and retailers.