by Avivah Litan | February 13, 2012 | Submit a Comment
Did I miss something? The PCI Council was supposed to finish guidelines for mobile payment card acceptance in 2011, but I can’t find any update on their website. Having just returned from “The Valley” where most security professionals are headed soon for the RSA Security Conference, I can reaffirm (as if anyone needs reminding) that [...]
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by Avivah Litan | January 26, 2012 | 4 Comments
No doubt you’ve seen this news already http://blogs.wsj.com/wsjam/2012/01/24/scotus-says-no-to-gps-tracking-without-a-warrant/?mod=google_news_blog The Supreme Court ruled that the police violated the 4th amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures) when police used GPS tracking on a narcotics-operative’s vehicle (planted there without his knowledge) to convict the man. His conviction was overturned because there was no valid warrant for the [...]
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by Avivah Litan | January 10, 2012 | 3 Comments
The new ICANN arrangement for opening up new domains and web addresses that becomes effective this week is good news for fraudsters. Other Gartner analysts, i.e. Andrew Frank, Lydia Leong and Ray Valdes, cover the overriding advertising and domain registration/monitoring aspects but from a fraud point of view, this is bad news for legitimate users. [...]
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by Avivah Litan | January 9, 2012 | 1 Comment
Paypal payments come to Home Depot store shoppers. See last Friday’s PayPal blog about their trial of point-of-sale (POS) payments at 5 unnamed Home Depot stores https://www.paypal-media.com/aboutus.cfm. Home Depot customers can now check out at those five stores by entering their phone numbers and PayPal PIN numbers, or by swiping their PayPal cards, at the [...]
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by Avivah Litan | December 15, 2011 | Comments Off
For years, I have been trying to get to the bottom of what type of self-learning predictive models and fraud scoring systems the vendors I cover provide. I often got the impression, that in many cases, it was a bit of a Wizard of Oz scenario, with some guys sitting behind a big door or [...]
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by Avivah Litan | December 8, 2011 | Comments Off
What really happened at Lucky and Savemart stores? See http://savemart.com/index.php?id=449 for their press release on this. Something here doesn’t add up. The chain says employee and customer bank accounts were compromised but employees generally don’t swipe their cards at the POS systems. So I for one, would like to understand the connection to employee accounts. [...]
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by Avivah Litan | November 8, 2011 | Comments Off
I was very excited to read this blog in Computerworld about Apple starting to link its iTunes wallet service to physical world payments: http://blogs.computerworld.com/19233/apple_quietly_begins_iphone_as_wallet_in_store_trials?source=CTWNLE_nlt_blogs_2011-11-08 It may be a slow start – and a long leap to go from barcode scanning at Apple stores to NFC payments anywhere accepted – but it’s a start for leveraging [...]
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by Avivah Litan | November 1, 2011 | Comments Off
Executives at many U.S. and global financial institutions are pounding on their risk managers to make sure they are not the next victim of a UBS-style rogue trading multi-billion dollar fiasco. Of course, many of the vendors engaged in data mining, analytics, and fraud prevention have taken notice and are pitching their wares to these [...]
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by Avivah Litan | October 10, 2011 | 5 Comments
Unless things change quickly (which I doubt will happen) Congress is about to head down the wrong path in tackling Medicare fraud. Under the recently-introduced bipartisan bill “the Medicare Common Access Card Act of 2011,” all Medicare recipients and providers will be issued a smart card. Recipients will also get a PIN to use when [...]
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by Avivah Litan | August 10, 2011 | Comments Off
Home lenders and banks are losing between $7.5 billion and $15 billion in fraud from seemingly-deplorable subprime mortgage activities that get the wrong people rich quick. It just doesn’t quit – fraud on the way into the subprime crisis, and now fraud as we try to dig our way slowly out. The techniques are essentially [...]
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