The Veterans Affairs Department agreed to a $20 million settlement yesterday, after concerns of identity theft arose from a 2006 case of a lost laptop and external hard drive. A VA analyst admitted to losing the laptop, which contained the names, birth dates and social security numbers of over 26 million veterans and

The sentence came in yesterday for a New York man who plead guilty to sending spam email messages to over 1.2 million AOL users in a way that avoided being noticed by the company’s spam filter. The messages were used by

What started off as a media dream story (with the words “Rupert Murdoch,” “employs” and “hacker” all in the same headline) ended on a very anticlimactic, and somewhat humorous, note. Readers might remember the DISH Network lawsuit that hoped to receive nearly $1 billion in damages from

EchoStar Communications, the parent company of DISH Network, filed a corporate espionage lawsuit against News Corp’s NDS Group, alleging that the firm hired one of the “two best hackers in the world” to hack into DISH’s satellite network and steal the company’s security codes, according to a report by Reuters. NDS, which provides various [...]

Who says random airport searches don’t work? United States customs officials discovered that Hanjuan Jin, 37, a China-born U.S. citizen, was allegedly trying to leak confidential trade secrets from her former U.S. employer to a China-based rival when they searched her luggage at

A Florida man has been found guilty of dishing out company trade secrets from his former employer, Alpha Mining Systems, to competitors. Alpha, a global manufacturer of industrial mining tires, won a $19.7 million judgment against Sam Vance, the company’s former sales and marketing manager. The judge ruled that Vance gave competitors more [...]

Jonathan Evans, the head of the UK’s MI5, recently sent a letter out to 300 British business leaders warning them to be wary of a possible Chinese espionage attack. Since then, the UK’s Times has reported that both Rolls-Royce and Shell have already been hit by “sustained spying assaults” from Chinese government-backed hackers. [...]

MessageLabs Inc, A company designed to protect electronic communications for its business clients, recently discovered a new method for online computer thieves to steal confidential data.  This time the hackers are aimed directly at CEOs.

Two men were charged in unrelated fraud cases yesterday.  The common denominator? Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York City.

The French government outlawed the use of Blackberry devices used to send and receive emails earlier this year because of fears that other countries’ security agencies will pick up the transmissions, French newspaper Le Monde reported.

Two Silicon Valley engineers set to go on trial for stealing trade secrets had their charges upgraded on Wednesday to economic espionage. Economic espionage, though rarely charged, is the most serious crime under the 1996 Economic Espionage Act.

A federal grand jury has indicted seventeen people over conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service of $13.1 million in illegal tax refunds. The scheme involved stealing the identity of over 300 nursing home patients to file fake tax returns.
The defendants used the information to file over 365 fraudulent federal tax returns in 27 states, [...]

A new study released by forensic accounting firm Kroll and the Economist Intelligence Unit revealed that a majority of companies around the world are exposed to fraud.
The study says that companies with over $5 billion in revenue lost more than $20 million on average due to fraud-related damages over the past three years. One [...]

Nine months of internal emails were stolen earlier this month from MediaDefender, an anti-piracy firm used by recording companies and Hollywood studios. A group devoted to countering anti-piracy measures, aptly named MediaDefender-Defenders, claimed responsibility for the theft. After obtaining the documents, MediaDefender-Defenders dispersed the emails digitally through peer-to-peer programs.
Now the emails are posted on [...]

What happened to the good old days, when employees just raided the supply closet? Fidelity National reported that the personal data of as many as 8.5 million customers was taken by a senior database administrator at the company. The company suggested that this number, up from initial reports from Fidelity of 2.3 million, [...]

A Long Island man pleaded guilty on Wednesday of conspiring to destroy a rival company’s product. Robert A. Schetty, III, 42, a vice president of Technic, Inc., coordinated an attempt to place hydrogen peroxide in a bath of chemicals used by rival company Rohm and Haas, Co. to test their new electroplating solution. [...]

Online virtual worlds like “Second Life” continue to grow at a rapid clip. Commerce, business meetings, and other far racier ‘encounters’ are becoming more commonplace in these virtual worlds.
To help protect its reputation, IBM announced this week that it was establishing a code of conduct to govern its more than 5,000 employees who [...]

A former Pfizer employee is trying to get a class action lawsuit filed against the company after 17,000 of Pfizer’s employees had sensitive personal information posted online by a third party. The information included names, social security numbers, cell phone numbers and “bonus information”.
The suit is asking for Pfizer to provide long-term identity theft [...]

According to media reports and public announcements from the company, software maker SAP has decided to take a different tact in its trade secret litigation with Oracle:
“Yes, we did it… but we didn’t see it.” Um…what????
SAP admitted this week that a subsidiary had completed “inappropriate downloads” of documents belonging to arch competitor Oracle. [...]

We’ve grown accustomed to taking off our shoes and bagging our liquids at airports. But what if the U.S. Government were to recommend another means of heightening national security and take away – brace yourselves – your Blackberry?
While the result would be nothing short of a riot in the work-obsessed United States, it [...]

As the Times in the U.K. reports… GLG Partners, the £10 billion London-based hedge fund, has been hit with its second insider trading fine from the French financial regulator, Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) , within the past six months.
Underscoring the severity of the misconduct, this was the largest fine that AMF could have levied.
At [...]

It hasn’t been the best year thus far for Best Buy – it’s been one plagued by controversy surrounding questionable marketing practices, document retention regarding litigation and allegations of invasion of privacy.
Perhaps the most widely-known incident is the lawsuit filed two weeks ago by the Connecticut Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, alleging that Best Buy was [...]

Meet Ronnie Segev. He’s a pianist. He also has called Priceline.com 215 times asking for a refund on a plane ticket. Allegedly the General Counsel of Priceline sent the cops after him and he went to jail for 40 hours. He wants everyone to forget about the incident. Thanks to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, that’s [...]

The secretary who attempted to sell Coca-Cola’s trade secrets to PepsiCo last summer was sentenced today to more than eight years in prison.
The perpetrator of the trade secret theft, Joya Williams, had faced up to 10 years in prison on the single conspiracy charge in a failed scheme to sell Coke’s trade secrets [...]

Today’s NY Times has a lengthy piece entitled “Blinking the Elderly, With a Corporate Assist”. It is really rather a depressing piece about how information brokers, such as InfoUSA sells telemarketing lists to criminal organizations that in turn prey upon elderly to defraud them. The story features a 92-year old man [...]