Choicepoint
They are to be frightened of. They have influenced national elections and are part of the data-mining setup under the GW Bush regime. Richard Armitage, John Ashcroft, Viet Dinh (wrote the US 'Patriot' Act) are part of the hierarchy.
One of world's biggest collectors of consumer data has agreed to pay $275,000 after federal authorities accused it of exposing the personal information of 13,750 people. The payment, which settles charges the Federal Trade Commission brought against Choicepoint, amounts to just $20 per exposed consumer. The breach was the …
But the system that was disabled was used to detect "unauthorised access", but the crims used stolen credentials to access the database. How would it then have known that those authorised credentials were being used by unauthorised persons?
Doesn't this mean that even if this mysterious system hadn't been disabled that it wouldn't have helped in this case?
The FTC is obviously cracking down on organisations that fail to recognise the severity of consumer data breaches. It’s not enough simply knowing where sensitive information, like consumer data is kept, but also who has access to it. As this incident clearly shows, automated access management policies and controls are vital to ensuring that only the right people are accessing data for the right reasons, and organisations are slowly learning that through these painful examples.
Stuart Hodkinson, UK General Manager, Courion