Stories about: Ameritrade Holding

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.

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.

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.

Ameritrade completed its acquisition of TD Waterhouse in January to become TD Ameritrade Holding Just prior to the completion of that acquisition, Ameritrade finished rolling out technology that encrypts all data as it moves from servers to tape backup devices. The encryption effort was a reaction to the company's loss of a data tape with the names of 200,000 clients in April 2005. Jerry Bartlett, CIO at TD Ameritrade, spoke with Computerworld recently about data security and storage management.

CIOs and other IT managers vented their disdain for inflated storage costs and bad storage management software pricing models during a panel discussion Tuesday at Storage Networking World in San Diego.

While there is an abundance of IT projects planned in coming months, CIOs are warning of a looming skills shortage that could stall rollouts.

Data encryption is a practice that is gathering steam in business, albeit slowly. Drew Robb takes a look at the various approaches early adopters are taking.

Iron Mountain announced this week that it has signed a deal with Decru to use its technology to encrypt all of its internal data backed up to digital tape. Iron Mountain executives said the move is in part designed to set an example for customers.

Among the ways Ameritrade Holding is looking to reduce IT complexity and costs is a decision to move Unix platforms to Linux operating systems running on Intel-based hardware -- a process the company began a year ago and hopes to complete in 18 months.