Breach

A proposed settlement by Certegy Check Services, which lost the personal financial information of millions of Americans last fall in an insider-related data breach, of a class-action lawsuit is a "mixed bag" that falls short of protecting the victims, security analysts told SCMagazine US.com.

New England is again the epicenter of a major retail data breach, this time with the Hannaford Bros. grocery store chain on Monday disclosing that hackers stole 4.2 million debit and credit card numbers from its computer systems.

Thirty-eight people living in New York have been charged with leveraging stolen consumer data to create bogus credit cards that were then used to purchase high-priced goods, such as computers and televisions, authorities said.

Security researchers have uncovered a pair of vulnerabilities in VMware software, virtualization technology used to run multiple versions of an operating system on a single computer. One flaw affects a server version of the software, the other is found in desktop software.

In the wake of a Princeton research team's surprising announcement of a simple method for stealing encrypted data from DRAM chips on PCs -- even after the unit's power has been shut off -- security experts told SCMagazineUS.com on Friday that the tools to thwart these thefts already are available.

ChoicePoint, whose watershed breach prompted a burst of state disclosure laws, has been acquired by LexisNexis information service parent, Reed Elsevier, for $4.1 billion, the two companies announced Thursday.

TJX on Wednesday reported a 47 percent spike in quarterly profits, aided by a reduction in the reserve that was created to pay for costs associated with last year's reported data breach.