Breach

The State Senate in California has passed measures that require more extensive notification to consumers of data breaches, establish a central reporting center for breaches, and permit local prosecution of identity theft in the nation's most populous state.

Attackers already have begun to exploit critical flaws in the ActiveX control of the Yahoo! Music Jukebox, Symantec said. Yahoo! is switching users to Rhapsody, its new on-demand music service partner.

Critical ActiveX control flaws have been detected in the Yahoo! Music Jukebox, which like vulnerabilities reported last week in MySpace and Facebook image uploaders, may permit attackers to take control of users' PCs.

Symantec has warned that a critical flaw in the ActiveX control of image uploaders that have been widely distributed to users of popular social networking sites Facebook and MySpace can be exploited by hackers to install malicious code on users' computers.

The Davidson Companies, a Montana-based financial services firm, said this week that one of its databases, which contains the names and Social Security numbers of 226,000 current and past clients, has been illegally accessed "by a third party through a sophisticated network intrusion."

Horizon Blue Cross/Blue Shield of New Jersey has notified more than 300,000 of its members that their personal information -- including Social Security numbers -- was contained in a laptop stolen in Newark earlier this month.

ChoicePoint will pay $10 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed after the data aggregator and credentialing service admitted to a major data breach in 2005.