Stories about: Ameritrade

Not all the data-leak start-ups have been snapped up by the big guys. Here are five data-leak-prevention companies to keep an eye on.

Data breaches cost companies an average of US$197 per record in 2007, according to a study by the Ponemon Institute. The average cost of a data breach was US$6.3 million, up from US$4.8 million in 2006.

Often, a standout IT leader is one who champions a project and guides a team to do remarkable things with scant resources. These Computerworld Premier 100 honorees had the courage to ask tough questions and used their consensus-building skills, flexibility and detailed analysis to reap huge gains internally.

How bad was 2007 for breaches, vulnerabilities and similar mayhem? On the bright side, it was better than 2008 is forecast to be. With more of every sort of meltdown predicted -- more criminalization of the hacker community, more Web-application attacks, more phishing, more spamming, more zero-day attacks and more virtualization-related threats -- we're happy to tell you that you are likely to look back on 2007 as the peaceful old days.

Corporate storage systems and networks are an attractive target for hackers looking to steal sensitive data or launch computer attacks, Alan Lustiger, security architect at TD Ameritrade, told an audience at Computerworld's Storage Networking World user conference in the US this week.

In a Special Client Announcement designed to attract as little media attention as possible, TD Ameritrade has admitted that six million customer records have been breached by spammers and other evildoers of the black hat persuasion.

Brokerage firm TD Ameritrade Holding Friday disclosed that the names, addresses, phone numbers and "miscellaneous trading" information of potentially all of its more than 6 million retail and institutional customers have been compromised by an intrusion into one of its databases.

Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the online brokerages in the U.S., with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.

Despite incidents such as the US$22 million in losses suffered by E-Trade Financial and TD Ameritrade Holding from online identity fraudsters, the problem of online identity threft is vastly over-hyped when compared to its more prevalent offline equivalent, according to one analyst group.

Overseas hackers broke into customer accounts at two popular online stock brokerages, TD Ameritrade Holding and E-Trade Financial, in a "pump and dump" stock-trading scheme that led to at least US$22 million in losses.

After Ameritrade Holding Group finished its acquisition of TD Waterhouse Group in April, it launched a business intelligence competency center made up of business users whose charter is to monitor and manage TD Ameritrade Holding's BI investments to make sure they yield results.