Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

Choicepoint, April 8

  • Choicepoint has been nominated for a lifetime Big Brother award. Best of luck, folks!
  • Prophet or Madman points to an article at Knowledge@Wharton about the issues raised by the case.
  • Robert Gellman has a column in DMnews “Out of the Frying Pan.”
  • Choicepoint has announced their earnings call and webcast, on April 21. (Is ‘before the market opens’ typical? I recall calls being after market close.)
  • Computerworld carries an article by Alan Brill and Jason Paroff, executives at investigative firm Kroll Ontrack, “They can’t steal data you don’t have:”

    We have observed that some of the sensitive data that gets stolen fits into one of several categories:

    • Data that was never needed
    • Data that was needed but should never have been stored
    • Data that was originally needed but was kept far beyond its useful life
    • Data that should never have been stored in an unencrypted form

    At some point, the question “Did you consider not having this data” is going to become a standard part of lawsuits. If you’re an IT manager, are you planning for that day?

  • Speaking of lawsuits, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports on the class action suits from the affected parties:

    Consumer Eileen Goldberg, one of the people who received a notice from ChoicePoint, was the first to sue the company. The California resident showed the letter to her son, Michael Goldberg, a prominent class-action attorney in Los Angeles. After looking into the incident and the lack of regulation governing the data-brokering industry, Goldberg and fellow attorneys at Glancy Binkow & Goldberg decided they had a case based on fraud and negligence.


    In the meantime, the firms involved in the ChoicePoint suits are trolling for more plaintiffs. They’ve launched Web sites. They’ve issued news releases. And at some point, they may try to subpoena ChoicePoint for that list of 145,000 clients-in-waiting.

My choicepoint category archive includes extensive coverage of the most recent Choicepoint ID theft issue.