As U.S. banks and retailers are barreling toward a 2015 deadline to replace magnetic-stripe credit and debit cards with more secure cards that come embedded with a microchip, researchers have announced a critical flaw in the card system.
SAN FRANCISCO — Bob Foreman’s architecture firm ran up a $166,000 phone bill in a single weekend last March. But neither Mr. Foreman nor anyone else at his seven-person company was in the office at the time. “I thought: ‘This is crazy. It must be a mistake,’ ” Mr. Foreman said.
New research suggests more than 1 billion data records were stolen from more than 1,500 individual data breaches last year. The latest findings from Gemalto, an enterprise security firm, represent a significant year-over-year increase in both corporate breaches and data theft.