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from Entrepreneurial:
Q&A with cyber crime expert Tim Francis
Timothy C. Francis is Second Vice President for Travelers Bond & Financial Products in Hartford, CT. Francis leads Travelers’ Business Insurance Management and Professional Liability initiatives and serves as Enterprise lead for Cyber Insurance. Reuters spoke with him about what small businesses need to know about cyber crime.
Small business owners hear a lot about the dangers of cyber crime and how they should fear it, but what exactly should they be afraid of? What are some examples of how small businesses can be affected by cyber crime?
To put it simply, small business owners should be concerned about the potential for loss and exposure of confidential data, commonly known as a data breach, as a result of a cyber attack. Confidential data can pertain to customers, employees and the business and typically includes items like company account records, contact and address information, purchasing history, credit card and Social Security numbers and medical data.
Data breaches can have serious consequences for the person whose data is breached, as well as the company that collects and holds that data. Nearly all 50 states have laws governing notification if/when a customer’s data is breached, and notification can be costly. Actual costs will vary depending on how many records are involved, but generally speaking it costs about $200 total per record. This total amount combines the actual cost of investigating and alleviating the situation, potential liability and potential loss of future business to competitors.
Why are small businesses often more likely to be victimized than larger businesses? Is it simply a lack of resources devoted to cyber security?
from Full Focus:
Shot in the murder capital
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Photographer Jorge Cabrera spent time on patrol with local police in San Pedro Sula, which was named the world's most violent city for a second year in a row, as they arrived at the crime scenes of victims of gun violence. Jorge documented the city's busy emergency room and visited the morgue. San Pedro Sula, the country's second largest city after Tegucigalpa, has a homicide rate of 169 per 100,000 people. Lax laws allow civilians to own up to five personal guns, and arms trafficking has flooded the country with nearly 70% illegal firearms. Read Jorge's personal account here.
from Unstructured Finance:
The burden of being SAC Capital’s “Portfolio Manager B”
Michael Steinberg, the SAC Capital Advisers portfolio manager who was arrested at the crack of dawn last Friday morning probably envies former Goldman Sachs trader Matthew Taylor’s rush-hour surrender to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday.
While Steinberg was led away in handcuffs as a Wall Street Journal reporter took shaky video footage of the scene outside his door at 6am, Taylor sauntered into FBI headquarters in New York on his own, at 8:30am, having had plenty of time to collect his wits with a cup of hot coffee.
from Felix Salmon:
The long arm of the Google
Is Google becoming a key arm of the law-enforcement complex? It certainly seems to be so with respect to art thefts. I first came across this idea back in November, when Bloomberg Markets profiled Jeff Gundlach, who was hit by art thieves in September:
The cerebral Gundlach also gave investigators a tip for solving the crime. He says that while he was at home in his family room, it dawned on him that thieves would do a Google search using his grandmother’s name to find out more about the paintings and how much they might be worth.
from Unstructured Finance:
FBI to press: How are we doing?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's press office has embarked on a bit of customer satisfaction research: The department is asking journalists to rate its performance during the hostage standoff in Alabama that ended last week.
It is a rare glint of cooperative spirit in the traditionally contentious relationship between journalists and public relations specialists.
from India Insight:
Delhi rape case and the need to revamp policing
"My father has called me 15 times since yesterday," a colleague told me today as New Delhi recovers from the shock of a woman being assaulted, gang-raped and thrown off a bus on Sunday night.
There were more comments from women on my Facebook feed: "It is a scary thought to go out for dinner at 9:15 pm"; "Men on Delhi streets can literally rape you with words ... met one giggling a** just now. Felt like picking a stone and hitting it right where it all starts from ..."
from Photographers Blog:
Raised behind bars
Across Argentina
By Carolina Camps
I began this documentary project in Unit 33 of Los Hornos women’s prison in La Plata, near Buenos Aires, with a brief visit in 2004. In 2007 I felt the need to return for the type of images that required me to get closer to the inmates. Wanting to go deeper into their lives, I worked in the maternity wing where the inmates lived with their children until the age of four. There were 63 children inside at that time.
They are children who were mostly born in jail and whose perspective of the world was confined to within the prison walls. They never committed a crime, but they were child prisoners. When they reached the age of four, the saddest day for their inmate mothers, they were sent outside to live with their extended family, or in a state institution if they don’t have one.
from Breakingviews:
Enforcers keep on casting for biggest SAC fish
By Reynolds Holding and Richard Beales
The authors are Reuters Breakingviews columnists. The opinions expressed are their own.
U.S. prosecutors haven’t given up on landing the biggest fish at SAC Capital. The Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday hit Mathew Martoma, an ex-trader at Steve Cohen’s $14 billion hedge fund firm, with criminal and civil insider trading complaints. The enforcers say the underling helped SAC make $276 million. But if they want Martoma to lend a hand reeling in Cohen, they’ll need to deal.
from The Great Debate UK:
Party political policing
--Laurence Copeland is a professor of finance at Cardiff University Business School. The opinions expressed are his own.--
I hope I am proved wrong, but I am afraid that the decision to introduce elected police commissioners will turn out in the long term to be the most damaging of all the stupid things this incompetent Government is doing. It is a fear that has been reinforced by the leaflet shoved through my door on the eve of the election. At the top, it has a bright red band reading “From...., your Labour Police and Crime Commissioner candidate” and a matching red ribbon at the bottom says “Vote Labour Thursday 15th November”.
from MacroScope:
‘What’s it got to do with me?’ Turning a blind eye to Libor lies
Barclays was fined a record $450 million last month by U.S. and UK authorities for manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, the interest rate that underpins transactions worth trillions of dollars worldwide, between 2005 and 2009. More than a dozen banks are expected to be drawn into the scandal, which is being probed by authorities in North America, Europe and Japan.
Below is the fascinating account of a former bank staff who worked alongside money market traders on just how it all went down:
