Recover Lost Documents

According to a report, the credit card information of 19,000 British Internet users was exposed on Google search recently before being removed.

Elinor Mills states in her report for CNET News that it is not certain when and for how long the information was available to Google searchers, although most of the cards had been canceled, as The Telegraph reported the UK payments association APACS as stating. Visible critical data consisted of names, addresses, and credit card data for thousands of people.

Originally, the data was posted on an unsecured server in Vietnam that was utilized by criminal gangs. The Telegraph reported that the server was closed in February; however, the “cached” version of it remained on Google.

Google offers tools that permit Webmasters to ensure that content is not cached or is removed. In this instance, it appears as though whoever leaked the data didn’t use those tools.

A Google spokesperson said in a statement that search engines such as Google do not own the content that is available on the Internet and they do not have the ability to remove content directly from the Web.

Card processor Visa has temporarily removed Heartland Payment Services, a leading processor of credit and debit payments, from Visa’s list of service providers that comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). Visa’s action comes two months after Heartland first announced that it had suffered a data security breach.

Seamus McAfee stated in an article on CreditCards.com that PCI compliant service providers follow a strict set of data security standards to safeguard consumers’ card information and fight identity fraud and theft.

Visa has questioned Heartland’s security compliance, particularly when the processor was breached last year. Visa has stated that no merchant that has been PCI compliant has been compromised. Visa has said that it would re-place Heartland on its list of PCI compliant processors as soon as it is determined that the company meets the standards necessary.

Visa’s move is one of a considerable string of events since mid-January of this year, when Heartland determined that malicious software had compromised its data in 2008. The data potentially exposed from this breach includes card numbers, expiration dates, and other data from the card’s magnetic stripe. In some cases, the names of customers who used credit or debit cards at Heartland’s network of 250,000 businesses were determined to have been potentially exposed as well.

According to American Banker, many banks and credit unions are pursuing lawsuits to compensate for the money spent to inform customers of the breach, re-issuing cards and repairing accounts for people who were affected by fraudulent activities.

In late January, Heartland stated that it had created a department to develop end-to-end encryption, a data protection tool that could provide greater security than PCI.

Although three men were arrested for allegedly being involved in the data breach, they are believed to be end users and not the masterminds.

Through an ambitious worldwide project, millions of documents in libraries and archives, visible in faded print, dust-filled albums or on microfilm, are being transcribed by dedicated genealogists and hobbyists and placed on the Web.

Julian Guthrie stated in his report for the San Francisco Gate that Ancestry.com has started the World Archives Project to expand its current database of about seven billion historical records. Documents such as U.S. naturalization records, slave manifests from the 1800s and newspaper index cards from England will be accessible online free of charge.

The company estimates that about 35 million documents will be transcribed via the World Archives Project this year.

Tim Sullivan, CEO of Ancestry.com, stated that the company looks to invest in digitizing records and creating searchable records online. What they are doing with the project is inviting the community, which is made up of deeply passionate hobbyists, to transcribe the documents.

Photographic images of the records will be available to subscribers to Ancestry.com, while the transcribed database will be available to everyone.

Elizabeth Shown Mills, a fellow of the American Society of Genealogists and the National Genealogical Society, said that access to records such as naturalization documents and slave manifests has only been available in very limited places. Mills said that you usually would have to travel to specific libraries or order the microfilm, so to be able to access these records online is a great step in the right direction.

The project has already about six million documents that have been transcribed by 11,000 volunteers in 65 countries. Documents range from marriage records and slave manifests to naturalization cards.

HP and Yahoo have notified users that they will be shutting down their online data backup services. This past January, AOL closed up its XDrive service.

Paul Shread stated in his report for Internet News that Yahoo’s free Briefcase service was bypassed by users who saw more benefits to the greater storage capacity of its e-mail and Flickr offerings, while the XDrive Web site now sends users to offerings from Box.net and ElephantDrive.

HP’s Upline service got off to a rough start last year when it suffered an outage soon after it launched. HP is no longer backing up customer files, but will temporarily permit customers to access files through the restore feature.

Jeff Boles, a Taneja Group analyst, stated that storage vendors try to tackle hosted storage services but do not put any innovation into their attempts. Also, said Boles, to some consumers, the services are hard to use, try to take on too much, or represent only a partial set of functionality.

Boles said that the most successful consumer services, such as EMC’s Mozy and Box.net, are targeted at narrow use cases like backup or single user archives.

Boles stated that he hopes to see something that has more caching and performance, while also maintaining the lightweight front ends that are expected by Web users.

Greg Schultz, founder and senior analyst at StorageIO, said that there is too much confusion, too many solutions, and not enough revenue or paying consumers in the cloud storage market.

Lauren Whitehouse of Enterprise Strategy Group stated that if a vendor has the business model that permits them to be cost-competitive while still maintaining strong service levels and they continually innovate, then they can make it in the cloud storage market.