#ebt-card-security

#ebt-card-security

Yahiya allegedly directed individuals to use their SNAP or EBT benefits to purchase large quantities of Red Bull from Sam's Club, then bought the items back for cash at a reduced price.

HHS Chief Information Officer Clark Minor stated that consolidating the CTO, CDO, and CAIO roles within his office allows the department to move faster on shared platforms and protect systems more effectively.

The public Quizlet set contained information about alleged codes for specific facility entrances. 'Checkpoint doors code?' asked one card, with a specific four-digit combination listed in response.

"I told [Brown] to just shake the machine, gently shake the machine. If something comes off, then that's how we know that [a scammer is] scamming him, there's a skimmer on it."

EBT card theft is a huge, huge problem. In New York alone, in the first six months of last year, $14 million of SNAP benefits were stolen. We get these complaints all the time to our office.

The ease of use means the ease of stealing. There are pieces of software and devices that are doing exactly the same thing that a point of sale does and it's transacting on your phone or on your credit card and if you don't have a thumbprint or a biometric on your phone, they can walk up and if you're not paying attention in a crowded area, they get close enough and they touch your phone they can do a transaction.

QR codes are two-dimensional images with glyphs of various sizes that store not just numbers, but text. When scanned, your phone extracts the encoded information and can act on it. For example, QR codes often embed URLs, allowing you to scan, say, a parking meter to launch a webpage where you can pay online.

The email seen by at least some customers of the Emma email platform was a phishing scam. Hackers hoped to inspire instant panic with the words, 'As part of our commitment to supporting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), we will be adding a Support ICE donation button to the footer of every email sent through our platform.'

Last month, I sat across from one of the brightest people I know as he explained how he'd lost nearly everything to a sophisticated scam. This wasn't some naive teenager or technophobe. This was my friend from university days, a retired executive who'd navigated corporate politics for decades and made shrewd investment decisions his whole life. Watching him piece together how it happened was like watching someone solve a puzzle in reverse.

Tax season is stressful for many, making it an ideal time for scammers to target unsuspecting and distracted taxpayers. Awareness is our first, and best, line of defense. Criminals often pose as the IRS, payroll companies, tax preparation services, or even trusted financial institutions in an effort to steal money and sensitive information.

Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades. Our statement incentivizes operators to use these innovative tools, empowering parents to protect their children online.

Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people's privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to "determine or verify" the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show.

We're diving into these data breaches and more with our latest EFFector newsletter. Since 1990, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This latest issue tracks U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) surveillance spending spree, explains how hackers are countering ICE's surveillance, and invites you to our free livestream covering online age verification mandates.

These days, the internet "looks a hell of a lot more like Las Vegas than 'Little House on the Prairie.'" That's how Andrew Ferguson, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, described the online experience of children in his opening remarks for an FTC workshop on age verification last week. The event took place on Wednesday, January 28, which also happened to be Data Privacy Day, an annual "holiday" of sorts to raise awareness about privacy issues and encourage better data protection practices.

Silent Push said it discovered the campaign after analyzing a suspicious domain linked to a now-sanctioned bulletproof hosting provider Stark Industries (and its parent company PQ.Hosting), which has since rebranded to THE[.]Hosting, under the control of the Dutch entity WorkTitans B.V., is a sanctions evasion measure. The domain in question, cdn-cookie[.]com, has been found to host highly obfuscated JavaScript payloads (e.g., "recorder.js" or "tab-gtm.js") that are loaded by web shops to facilitate credit card skimming.