Category: information

Massive Data Release on Internet

Collection #1 is a data set that was dumped onto the Internet. It contains 773 million email IDs and 21 million passwords and anybody can see the data.

Security researcher Troy Hunt runs the Have I Been Pwned website that lets people check if their email address has been in a data breach and he has analysed the data and uploaded it to his website haveibeenpwned.com so anyone can check if their details are included in this or any other high profile data breach. He does make the actual data available to anybody.

His analysis shows that Collection #1 is a set of email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows. It’s made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources”

After cleaning the data and removing duplicates, it seems that 772,904,991 unique email addresses, along with 21,222,975 unique passwords are available in plain text. This does not include passwords that were found still in their hashed form.

Importantly, anyone who gets their hands on the cache can easily test the plain-text passwords against actual accounts. Approximately 140 million email accounts and some 10.6 million passwords were not known from past breaches.

If one or more of your accounts are in this data breach, then it is likely that one or more of your old passwords are available for others to see. Make sure you are not still using passwords from years ago.

Check if your accounts are included in the breach and if necessary change passwords and delete unnecessary accounts.

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Australian Scam Statistics for 2018

In 2018, people submitted 177,516 reports of scams to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

The losses incurred by these people totalled $107,025,301.

Many people do not report scams as they may feel they are to blame or that the police cannot catch the scammers, so the real level of scamming losses is likely to be much higher than the quoted figure.

The highest number of losses occur through phishing i.e. people conning you into giving them your personal details such as login and password or card payment details, bank account etc.

‘Threats to life, arrest or other’ covers a lot of scams e.g. the scammer phones you pretending to be from a government department and demands an immediate payment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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TSB Punished by Customers

A recent poll by Which magazine shows that TSB is now regarded as poor and rated even lower than RBS and other lenders responsible for the financial crisis.

In February 2018, TSB was highly ranked by its customers as a bank you can trust, but then the sky fell in for the bank when their new IT systems that hadn’t been tested sufficiently collapsed and many customers were locked out of their accounts for days or weeks in some cases.

Some customers had accidental access to other people’s accounts, the bank had little idea of what to do and their communication with customers was poor leaving many very angry at what happened.

To make matters worse, many fraudsters jumped on the bandwagon and began sending fake emails and making calls to TSB customers, leading to a large number of frauds.

The problems led the FCA to begin an investigation with the Prudential Regulation Authority.

Up to 1.9 million people using TSB’s digital and mobile banking found themselves locked out of their bank accounts following the migration of data on customers from former owner Lloyds’ IT system to a new one managed by current owner Sabadell.

TSB CEO Dr Pester told MPs on the Treasury Committee that he took “absolute responsibility” for the problems, but said the migration of billions of customer records was successful “to the penny” and the underlying engine of the bank was “working well”.

Paul Pester lost his job but the damage done to consumer confidence will take a long time to recover.

The problems had a simple cause – inadequate testing of the new systems in order to save time and stay on schedule.  That was a bad judgement.

The lesson is clear – do not take risks with customer data as you may end up very sorry.

If you’ve had bad experiences with TSB – let me know by email.

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Engaging Works

This is a new set of Internet services at https://engaging.works created by Mark Price, the former Managing Director of Waitrose and Deputy Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership. He says that driven by his belief in the potential of happier employees to transform businesses, he has developed a set of simple tools for companies and individuals to use.

The most popular of these so far is the happiness survey.

It’s quick and easy to fill in and measures your happiness level at work compared to others in similar industries.

Marks believes the key factors for happy employees are:

  1. Job satisfaction
  2. Information Sharing
  3. Fair reward and recognition
  4. Empowerment
  5. Well-being
  6. Instilling Pride

There is also a career developer tool, mentor matching, online chats, messenger and more

Mark has big plans as he wants to challenge Facebook and others and he starts out with a belief that the customer’s data belongs to them not to him (unlike Facebook).

We’ll see how well he succeeds as he develops more tools in this market.

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Financial Loss Due to Fraud

 

 

Source: Crime Survey for England and Wales. Office of National Statistics. 2017 data.

 Cost Fraud Involving Financial Loss (%) Cumulative Loss (%)
Less than £20 9.0 9.0
£20 – £99 30.0 39.0
£100 – £249 18.8 57.9
£250 – £499 14.5 72.3
£500 – £999 10.9 83.2
£1000 – £2,499 9.6 92.8
£2,500 – £4,999 4.2 97.0
£5,000 – £9,999 1.7 98.7
£10,000 – £19,999 0.8 99.4
£20,000 and above 0.6 100.0

You can see from the figures that there were modest losses (less than £100) for 39 % of victims, but at the other extreme, some people lost more than £20,000.

The higher losses are most commonly from frauds involving house purchase and investment fraud.

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