Originally published July 11 2005
Experts claim criminals winning identity theft battle
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Federal agents feel as if they have been left in the dust while tracking the case of an Arizona firm that was hacked 40 million credit card numbers, and Knight-Ridder reports that corporate America's complacent attitude toward security is one of the biggest contributors to preventing and solving identity theft cases in general.
Federal agents are in a familiar position as they probe the computer-security breach at an Arizona firm that left credit-card data for some 40 million people open to theft: Once again, they're playing catch-up.
The decline of face-to-face cash transactions and the growth of Internet commerce have made credit-related data thefts a regular occurrence and a high priority for federal law enforcement.
In the Arizona case, little is known about whether criminals are using the information that computer hackers stole from CardSystems Solutions, a credit card-payment processing company.
The break-in is the latest in a string of similar lapses that have left personal information for 58 million Americans - such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and addresses - vulnerable to theft.
Computer crimes often are difficult to solve.
Doing so can take years, and cyberspace provides criminals with anonymity and many ways to cover their footprints.
The technology changes so quickly that by the time criminal activity has been discovered the suspects may have moved on to different crimes and methods.
Computer forensic evidence can disappear in days, leaving investigators with a cold trail.
And because the crimes are often carried out by organized gangs in Russia, Central Europe and Africa, the geographical, jurisdictional, language and legal barriers are sometimes insurmountable for U.S. law enforcement.
"Being so far away with so many physical boundaries helps hide them over there and it makes it tougher to track them down," said Mike Gibbons, the vice president for federal security services at Unisys and a former head of FBI computer-crime investigations.
Corporate America's complacency about computer security is a problem too, said Gary Morse, the president of Razorpoint Security Technologies, a New York City consulting firm that breaks into the computer systems of Fortune 500 companies to find weaknesses before hackers do.
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