Data breaches

Congress should consider acting quickly or companies could treat the Golden State's new data privacy restrictions as a national standard.

Congress should consider acting quickly or companies could treat the Golden State's new data privacy restrictions as a national standard.

Democratic lawmakers and consumer advocates say the remedies offered to consumers by firms like Capital One and Equifax are too difficult to access and not particularly helpful.

Staying on top of new threat sources isn’t easy, but things will keep getting worse if we can’t openly discuss the matter, says Monica Eaton-Cardone, COO of Chargebacks911 and CIO of its parent company Global Risk Technologies.

The lawmakers, including Sens. Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren, sent the bank a letter focusing on customers' difficulty enrolling in credit monitoring and identity protection services.

The company still intends to shut down its data centers next year even as the recent hacking that exposed the data of some 100 million people raised questions about its aggressive embrace of cloud computing.

Speaking during NAFCU's Congressional Caucus, a leader from the U.S. Department of Treasury said credit unions can help the agency improve how consumers are notified in the event of a data breach.

It's not on consumers to fix this problem, says NuData Security's Justin Fox, who argues organizations must get more cooperative and proactive to improve authentication.

There's equal importance on encrypting data and securing the server, says STEALTHbits Technologies' Adam Laub.

The equation is no mystery to those in payments or financial services: Expand your digital footprint, and you expand the opportunities for hackers to damage your network.

Consumer trust is hard to win, easy to lose, and eroding daily as attackers achieve success with fraudulent transactions, says NuData Security's Justin Fox.

Many companies have tools in place alerting them to possible security issues, but if companies get a large volume of issues, this quickly overwhelms the ability for security and risk professionals to analyze, prioritize, and remediate, writes DivvyCloud's Chris DeRamus.

At the same time, consumers hold banks to tougher disclosure standards than government agencies, health care organizations and retailers, according to Experian.

With lots of day-to-day IT tasks and countless systems to configure, it's easy to make mistakes, says Brian Kelly, CEO of CloudBolt.

Not only does it illustrate the willingness of regulators to impose massive fines for massive data breaches, it also reminds us that this situation could be just the tip of a financial iceberg, says White Hat Security's Mark Rogan.

There is always the chance that privileged employees will either become bad actors who use their access to confidential data for their own gain, or that they will succumb to a hacking attempt and thereby open the door to an external bad actor, says Unisys' Maria Allen.

Human error makes credit unions vulnerable to cybersecurity threats, but executives can fight this by setting up the right processes and technology.

Machine learning can build a layered defense, and analysts don't have to spend as much time combing through data to spot threats, says Exabeam's Anu Yamunan.

A senior official at the European Central Bank warned that banks embracing external data storage and other digital technology need to face the reality that those systems are inviting targets for hackers.

The Massachusetts Democrat is questioning a claim by the agency about the amount of redress available to those affected by the credit bureau's 2017 data breach.