Information security analytics

FBI agents served a federal search warrant to 20-year-old University of Tennessee student David Kernell early Sunday morning in their investigation into the hacking of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail last week. According to WBIR TV, an unidentified witness told the station that several FBI agents entered Kernell's Fort Sanders, Tennessee, residence around midnight, looking for clues that might tie the son of Democratic State Representative Mike Kernell to the case.

An international investigation is under way to find hackers believed to have stolen information from financial servers in the UAE to make fraudulent credit and debit card purchases in the US. The scheme came to light after a number of employees at the US Embassy – and a handful of other US citizens – had unauthorised purchases show up on their credit and debit cards in recent months, prompting the embassy to issue a warning on its website. “To date, all of the reported fraudulent charges have been made from the United States,” the message said.

OSLO - Norway's national tax office mistakenly sent confidential information about nearly 85% of Norwegian adults to nine major media groups, an error the government described as "extremely serious."

Countrywide Financial Corp. is offering two years of free credit monitoring to customers whose sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, allegedly was stolen from the home lender's computer files. In one of the largest data theft cases in years, a former Countrywide employee was arrested Aug. 1 and charged with illegally accessing the firm's computers for more than two years.

GS Caltex Co., South Korea's second-largest oil refiner, faced a class action suit brought by 500 clients seeking compensation for a recent leak of their private data, their representative said on Sept. 10.

Police detained two employees of a subcontractor of GS Caltex and two of their friends, Sunday, for the alleged theft of personal information of more than 11 million customers of the oil refiner.

A laptop stolen Monday contained the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of about 12,700 applicants to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and another 1,100 people at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Bank of New York Mellon Corp. said Thursday that a security breach involving the loss of personal information is much larger than previously reported, affecting about 12.5 million people, up from 4.5 million.

The eBay computer scandal which saw the loss of personal data on a million bank customers is to be investigated by the Information Commissioner.