Word: credit-card
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Since the last maximum, the number of satellites in orbit has increased sixfold, to more than 600. They are essential for everything from telephone service and air-traffic control to you-name-it.com connections, pay-at-the-pump credit-card service and hundreds of other information-age conveniences. Yet for reasons of economy, or just plain indifference, few of these spacecraft are properly shielded...
...merchants and shoppers alike, there may be no greater fear than that of credit-card theft. And there is good reason. The idea that millions of credit-card numbers are being beamed to thousands of websites every day must be an irresistible lure to any hacker with a larcenous bent. Last week e-tailers were sweating over reports of an international cybertheft that for pure nerve, craft and brass rivals any ever tried before. If the FBI doesn't crack the case soon, skittish consumers, who had just started growing comfortable with the idea of Web shopping, could grow uncomfortable...
...target of the virtual stickup was a website known as CD Universe, which sells music and DVD movies online. Doing business on the Net since 1996, CD Universe had served more than 300,000 customers--which translates to roughly 300,000 credit-card numbers salted away in its electronic files. Last month the site's parent company, eUniverse, based in Wallingford, Conn., was contacted by someone identifying himself as "Maxus," a 19-year-old Russian who claimed to have hacked into those files and filched those numbers. The FBI has since asked the company not to reveal whether that communication...
...bluff, eUniverse declined to pay and instead contacted the FBI. Maxus, it turned out, wasn't kidding: on Christmas Day, the so-called Maxus Credit Cards Datapipe went into service, offering Web surfers thousands of free, pilfered card numbers at the click of a mouse. It was only last week that a Web-security company alerted eUniverse to the existence of the site, which was quickly shut down. By then, though, 25,000 credit-card numbers had been given away. "Of the card numbers the FBI pulled off the site," says eUniverse vice president Brett Brewer, "a majority were ones...
...widespread obesity. The morning television shows like to kick off the new year with a series on some miracle diet that forbids fruits and vegetables but allows whale blubber in any amount. My old Army friend Charlie says he always spends the first half of January staring at his credit-card bill and his stomach, wondering whether he really has to do anything about either one of them in order to survive until the Super Bowl...