These big corporations like Target and P.F. Chang’s don’t give a shit about your personal data. The CEO’s and top executives of these greedy fuck corporations care only about their bonuses, stock price and manipulated EPS. They invest stockholder money in buying back their own stock to elevate EPS and drive their compensation higher. They could be investing that cash in IT to insure security of your credit card data, but that would cut into profits.
We received a letter from our bank saying they needed to send us a new credit card due to a data breach at a merchant. Of course, they didn’t reveal the merchant. These banksters and corporate scumbags prefer to cover-up their ineptitude, incompetence, and recklessness. I had to spend over an hour changing all my automatic credit card payments because these scumbags can’t secure personal data. Fuck em.
Make these fuckers pay for their incompetence and greed. Stop eating at P.F. Chang’s and crush their profits. You never see a cat around a P.F. Chang’s. I wonder why?
P.F. Chang’s probes customer data theft
By Priya Anand
P.F. Chang’s China Bistro says an unknown number of credit and debit cards used at the chain’s restaurants have been part of a “security compromise,” and it doesn’t know which ones.
The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Asian chain with more than 200 U.S. restaurants first learned of the breach on Tuesday from the U.S. Secret Service, it said in a statement posted online .
P.F. Chang’s has moved to a manual credit card imprinting system that it will use while it investigates the breach with the Secret Service and third-party forensics experts, CEO Rick Federico said in the statement. “Because we are still in the preliminary stages of our investigation, we encourage our guests to be vigilant about checking their credit card and bank statements,” he said.
The restaurant says it is working with credit card companies to identify the affected cards. This adds to a wave of data compromises kicked off by Target’s (NYSE:TGT) epic holiday season breach that affected up to 110 million customers. There have been more than 100 breaches discovered just this year, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, with victims ranging from credit card company American Express (NYSE:AXP) to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, high-end retailer Neiman Marcus and the University of Maryland.
A la Pirate Jo…….Don’t use plastic!
My wife and I stopped using debit and credit cards for everything except gas and an occasional online purchase. This began last November. A few weeks later I walked into a local grocery store near work to pick up a few things for work and the place was a nightmare with people walking around informing everyone that they could only accept cash or checks. It seems that the local card processsing firm had their sysytems compromised in early OCTOBER (and was fully aware of it) but they failed to tell anyone.
My transaction went smoothly as I had already switched to cash. However, two weeks before Christmas our checking/debit acct was drained to the last penny in three transactions by a Walgreens store in southern Mexico as a result of the early OCT data breach. I had only parked a few bucks in there for gas purchases and in case we ran out of cash while out. Now paychecks are cashed and withdrawn the same day. There were literally tens of thousands of families left broke just before Christmas because of their complacency. The card processor handled ALL digital transactions in all but one small grocery store. ASSHOLES!
Oh well, I like spending cash. We save more money by using cash anyway. I even sell a few FRN’s that pass through my hands from time to time. Turns out there are people out there who “collect” notes with unique or special serial numbers on them. Who knew? They pay a premium for certain notes.
@IS, yep, totally agree, but I fear this won’t last much longer.
We all know the “gray” and black economies are booming, we also know the banksters have been gifted cash cows in the form of SS, SSDI and SNAP.
It doesn’t take a genius to add 2 + 2 and figure out what is coming next.
The end of “cash,” then ALL will be forced to turn over ALL sovereignty and security to these criminals.
The banksters will be making trillions on the back of our poorest working citizens.
Meanwhile the criminals will figure a way around, they always do.
Those of us that just want to keep what we earned will be screwed over.
Wish there were a way to starve the mega-corp and government beast, while not having to go live in a cave and give up all technology.
I haven’t found it yet, if someone else has, please, please, clue us in on it.
Been there once in my life…
Thousands Of Jobs Are In Peril Because Businesses Ignore Cybersecurity Threats
By Lauren C. Williams on June 9, 2014
Cybercrime is costing businesses worldwide almost $500 billion a year, depleting jobs from the economy, a new report finds. These crippling losses could have been prevented if companies took cybersecurity threats more seriously.
The report released Monday by antivirus software company McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies is one of the first to show how pervasive cybersecurity threats are in everyday life and extend beyond stolen passwords, emails and identity theft.
Cybercrime ranks among the biggest drains on international economies, along with drug trafficking, counterfeiting, and car crashes, the report said. Businesses spend about $455 billion to clean up after breaches and other security threats.
Large-scale attacks cost victims and companies upwards of $100 million to recover. The U.S., China, and Germany lost the most with a total of $200 billion. The U.S. accounted for half that loss. American companies spent over $5 million per breach in 2012, according to a Ponemon study.
Last year’s Target breach that hit more than 100 million customers, cost banks $200 million partly to issue new credit and debit cards. Almost all businesses in the United Kingdom reported breaches in 2013 that cost small businesses $100,000 and bigger companies $1.4 million per incident on average.
Most of that burden falls on developed countries with robust economies. Because countries such as the U.S. rely more on product innovation for their exports, a hacker could steal ideas and not just customers’ personal information, which leads to a lost of competitiveness and ultimately layoffs.
Stolen ideas affect what kinds of goods a country can export, as well as overall GDP. Small changes to GDP impact employment, shifting workers from well-paid jobs to lower paying ones or unemployment, the report said.
The United States alone stands to lose 200,000 jobs from cybercrime — most of which are in high-paying fields such as new medical technologies, computers and electronics.
Even in the face of significant losses, companies still don’t invest enough in cybersecurity. “[Businesses] lack the incentive to do more because they underestimate risk,” the report said. Instead, companies prioritize cutting costs and boosting profits, a pattern that is more detrimental to companies in the long run.
Recovering from a breach is about five times as expensive as preventing one: For every $5 spent recovering from a breach, companies could spend $1 on encryption which would minimize intrusions, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In the last year, as many as 800 million people had their personal data stolen by hackers, including at least 40 million in the United States, the report said. But businesses, particularly retailers, haven’t beefed up security efforts to keep pace with sales. American retailers only spend roughly 2 percent of their tech budgets on security, even though business is expected to rise 4 percent by 2017, Reuters reported.
That trend is likely to continue unless stronger policies are implemented. Retailers and other businesses aren’t required to invest in cybersecurity, even though the potential damage for consumers is vast. As major security threats such as the Heartbleed bug become more common, some companies are trying to do more to prevent the next big attack. Big name retailers such as Target and Nike recently banded together with federal law enforcement to trade information on potential hacks and software weaknesses.
Those efforts, however, are often undermined by companies delaying on security measures because of upfront costs. Companies are allowed to self-regulate their cyberattack response largely due to the lack of uniform standards. For example, despite being warned years in advance that Microsoft was phasing out Windows XP this year, retailers and banks procrastinated in updating their software, exposing them to cyberattacks.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/06/09/3446533/cybercrime-jobs-report/
I cut up my credit cards years ago. I pay cash for everything except expensive items which I pay for either by debit or check. All of my monthly bills are direct withdrawl.
I wish I could participate in these discussions.
Credit card …. what is this thing you speak of?
Not a fan of debit cards. The banks keep pushing them on me. I’ve had to go in person into a branch to demand a plain ATM card without the visa/MC ability. I can dispute a charge on a credit card. I don’t want anyone debiting my bank account with the onus on me to get my own money back. Young people like debit cards, but they don’t have any money to worry about.
Iska, debit cards are protected. I got my money back but did not even have to close my bank (credit union) account. They just issued news cards and PINS. It seems that when your card is compromised it is just the card data that is at risk, not your savings and checking accounts directly. It didn’t make much sense to me as explained so my accounts contain almost zero funds.
The day began with a soft rain in the hours before dawn. I usually get up before everyone else, make a pot of coffee and catch up on the world outside through the Internet. I have been using my daughter’s laptop lately because our desktop shit the bed about six weeks ago. Unfortunately I ah a contract/insurance policy through an outside IT company and I tried, unsuccessfully, for the past six weeks to get the thing back up and running. After forty or so phone calls to the good people of India and thirty hours of my time, I still don’t have a functioning computer and I’m out the $400 for the policy. In fact, I was on the phone with them at 10 am when a neighbor drove up in his pickup.
The rain eased up and the two of us took a walk with the animals following at a safe distance, chewing their cud methodically. My neighbor had just finished baling hay on a couple of his fields and having heard from another farmer that we were building our herd he was interested in selling me 600 bales.
We don’t do a lot of paying for things so we got around to talking about what he needed for trade.
He’s a lot younger than I am, early thirties I’d guess, but he was hip to what’s going down with the economy and by the time the walk had come to an end we had made a trade so that he now had a feeder calf and I had some extra hay. He feeds his family, I feed mine. Neither of us lost out, both of us gained something and we both came to an understanding. Turns out this guy was one of the firemen who helped when my barn burned down even though we had never met face to face
As we shook hands at the back of his truck I could tell that I now had one more ally I could depend on and I think he felt the same. Two interactions, one for money on the scale of global economics, across continents and costing me countless hours with no resolution. The other local, with someone who spoke my language for something that benefited both parties, and at no cost out of pocket.
No one has to live this way, the constant consumption, the eating out, the credit cards, the foreign intermediaries and everyone at every level with their hand outstretched, wanting a cut.
Like the old lady in the commercial says, “That’s not how this works. That’s now any of this is supposed to work.”
Right now the kids are out back, the rain falling again as they laugh and scream from the trampoline and after I post this I am going to take the HP 300 Touch Smart desktop down to the sand pit and put a couple of rounds through it for my own entertainment.
@IS, yep debit cards are protected, but the last time my account was hit, they took $800 from me, and even though I called up the computer company and informed them of the chargeback in time to stop the computer from being shipped to the thieves, my money was gone for 21 days.
Legally, they can do nothing for 20 days AFTER they receive a faxed statement from you. Then they can take up to 30 days to put the money back into the account. So your cash could be gone for FIFTY days, long enough to lose a home, or car, if the theft makes you unable to pay your bills.
ALL credit laws, well most of them, have now been changed to always favor the bank, and the banks keeping your money from you for as long as possible.
Most people do not realize that any non-interest bearing account can be (virtually) shut down and the funds “frozen” for up to 20 days, with the option to extend it for any reason. Most of the notices were sent with statements back in ’09 or ’10. Very quietly. Now I try to keep the bulk of my balance in my savings, then just transfer to checking as I pay bills or buy stuff.
@whatever, your cut & paste stinks of propaganda meant to make us run to the gubment and demand they “do something!”
Which will be the beginning of the end of free speech and small business on the ‘net.
The government, and McAfee for that matter, could not care ONE iota about “cybercrime” as it pertains to you and I. McAfee relies on it to make a buck, the gubment chooses to do nothing even when the real life perpetrator is found for them. But they sure as hell like to release pieces like that to scare us into gifting our one remaining free(er) frontier to them.
Just something to think about. Beware of government “protection,” it generally doesn’t protect us at all, and nearly always costs us American small business and another strata of our middle class.
@TE, I use a credit union and had my money back before Christmas.I think it only took about 6 business days. The sad part is that they have had a huge campaign going informing account holders of their new fraud protection blah, blah, blah yet I was the one who discovered the problem and I’m the one who reported it. They looked at the computers slack jawed trying to figure out how their system didn’t catch the fraud considering that the three fraudulent events occurred 2800 miles from my home. I told them to ask for a refund on their fraud protection system.
IS, I think you’re making our point.
No offense intended to anyone for whom debit cards work, but here’s an anecdote: My brother with a 590 credit score and who struggles to keep the lights on uses a debit card. Another brother who earns seven figures as a corporate mucky muck wouldn’t carry a debit card for all the tea in China. I assume the rich brother’s checking account routinely gets up into six figures before he transfers money out. He’s too busy earning money to audit his checking account. If someone cloned his debit card he could probably lose tens of thousands and not notice for a month or two. He’s rich enough to not balance his checking account, but not so rich that he doesn’t care about having five figure sums stolen.
Admin – automatic payments of any kind are a risky proposition, IMHO, for what it is worth. They can be very difficult to cancel.
llpoh
You have to use a credit card for EZ Pass. If I didn’t have EZ Pass, my commuting would be even worse than it already is. I have to pay the companies protecting this website with a credit card payment that is automatic. There are some you can’t avoid.
The credit card and banking industry lose so much money to fraud, it would make your head spin.
I’ve been told, but can’t verify it, that they’re then able to deduct the losses directly from their tax bill, meaning that you and I pay for it. Just about par for the course, isn’t it.