Ten Common Identity Theft Myths Dispelled
By Robert Siciliano, ID Theft Expert and Security Consultant to Intelius.com
Identity theft is preventable. As with any other crime, the risk will always be there. But there are many things people can do to minimize that risk, both online and offline.
Top Five Financial Sector Security Threats
By Kevin M. Nixon, Information-Security-Resources.com Security Editor
With the threat of aftershocks in the US Stock market, continued bank closings and takeovers by the FDIC, serious consideration needs to be given to changing the current reporting, auditing and oversight regulations, and the public needs to pressure elected officials into action before our entire country is taken off financial life support.
ISR News: Online Game Issued Bank License
Excerpts From BBC News
“We will be in a position to offer real bank services to the inhabitants of our virtual universe,” said Jan Welter Timkrans, boss of Mindark. It plans to offer players interest-bearing accounts, let them deposit their salaries and pay bills or lend cash via the in-game bank.
FDIC Q4 2008 Graphs Show No Bottom
Source: FDIC.gov
Insured banks and thrifts set aside $69.3 billion in provisions for loan and lease losses during the fourth quarter, more than twice the $32.1 billion that they set aside in the fourth quarter of 2007. Loss provisions represented 50.2 percent of the industry’s net operating revenue (net interest income plus total noninterest income), the highest proportion since the second quarter of 1987 when provisions absorbed 53.2 percent of net operating revenue. As in the fourth quarter of 2007, a few institutions reported unusually large trading losses, while others took substantial charges for impairment of goodwill.
The Financial Industry Takes Too Much
Feature Article By Anthony M. Freed, ♦ ISR Financial Editor
“The financial sector itself has been building for many decades into the largest single element of the American economy. We have moved to a world where far too many of us seemingly no longer make anything; we’re merely trading pieces of paper, swapping stocks and bonds back and forth with one another, and paying our financial croupiers a veritable fortune.
In the process, we have inevitably added even more costs by creating ever more complex financial derivatives, in which huge and unfathomable risks have been built into the financial system.” - John Bogle, Vanguard Founder
