Posts by Rebecca Howard

X-ray recycling has become more regulated with the final rule for HITECH which was published earlier this year.  The penalties for improper disposal of jacket and reports, as well as information bearing film have been established and enforcement detailed to the Office of Civil Rights and state attorney generals.  Negligent disposal has serious financial penalties…

As a highly reputable resource for document shredding in Colorado, XpresShred has become very popular among small to mid-sized businesses. Medical offices, legal offices and retailers love the convenience and security that locally owned XpresShred provides with document shredding in Denver metro area. However, document destruction isn’t just for businesses; it’s for everyone. Homeowners, renters,…

Flash-based memory has been an industry standard for years, but solid state drives (SSDs) are just now becoming affordable enough to be included in original equipment manufacturer (OEM) devices. Solid state hard drives replace the traditional hard disk drive for storing system data as well as user documents, settings, records and credentials. SSDs are particularly…

What is card skimming? ‘Card skimming’ is the illegal copying of information from the magnetic strip of a credit or ATM card. It is a more direct version of a phishing scam. The scammers try to steal your details so they can access your accounts. Once scammers have skimmed your card, they can create a…

Mailings for unsolicited offers of pre-approved credit cards present a significant risk to identity theft if they fall into the wrong hands. Applications are completed under the name of the person identified and the address is changed so that the bills are sent to a different address. The victim, in this case, may not find…

Everyone has turned on the local news to see some local company that improperly discarded client’s files in the dumpster.  Most of the time it is an employee who did not receive the proper training.  Another poor business practice is recycling without destroying.  We see it on a daily basis.  Loading docks all over the…

The data recoverability or the overall security of the hard drive destruction process is a factor that has become more and more important as the number of obsolete or replaced hard drives has grown.  What is sufficient to ensure that the data contained on a hard drive is unrecoverable? It is useful to consider the…

The IRS reports that 641,052 taxpayers were the victim of identity theft in calendar year 2011.  The significant increase in identity theft of the past few years has overwhelmed the IRS.  TIGTA found that identity theft cases were not worked timely and it can take more than a year to resolve the problem for the…

The process for rectifying an occurrence of identity theft can be very time consuming, frustrating and costly.  Furthermore, the perpetrator of the identity theft is unlikely to ever be caught.  Unfortunately, there is a very big return to risk calculation that a thief makes.  If they are ever caught, the consequences are much less than…