During the 2009 PLUS International Conference in Chicago, we hosted a panel titled "Insurance Innovation: An Oxymoron?"

In this interview with session panelist Leib Dodell of ThinkRisk, Insurance Journal asks a few additional questions to whether innovation can couple with insurance and financial services.

A survey released today by Travelers reveals how the use of social media can expose businesses to risk. As the Travelers Global Technology business unit commemorates its 25-year anniversary, it conducted a national online survey of more than 2,000 adults to explore trends in social media and the potential risks to businesses.

A key finding in the survey shows that one out of eight respondents indicated that they post work-related information on social media Web sites. In fact, 30 percent feel it is acceptable to post information online about their employer as long as they believe it is true. Survey results also showed that more than 75 percent of those who post anything personal online said they were “not at all” or “not very concerned” about information posted online causing professional damage.

Read the full story here on the SmartBrief website.

Download the survey here from the Travelers website.

The Act amends the California Code of Civil Procedure by expressly permitting discovery of electronically stored information (ESI), with the end goal of improving discovery measures during litigation and avoiding undue involvement by the court in resolving e-discovery disputes. All discovery requested or responded to in regards to ESI must now comply with the Act, which for the first time provides definitions of ESI. The Act defines ESI as “information that is stored in an electronic medium” and defines “electronic” as “relating to technology having electrical, digital, magnetic, wireless, optical, electromagnetic, or similar capabilities.”

For the full review, please click here to visit the JD Supra website.

The insurance industry has developed a sophisticated level of underwriting and claims avoidance procedures as it responds to the growing threat of attacks on Internet networks such as those targeting U.S. and South Korean Web sites earlier this month, industry experts said.

"The use of technology and the reliance on technology has been increasing drastically for years, but only recently did insurance coverage offer a viable risk transfer piece. ? Now you're seeing the coverage starting to address the risks that are in that increased dependence on and use of technology," said Robert A. Parisi Jr., a Marsh Inc. senior vice president responsible for technology-related issues.

Read the full story here on the Individual.Com website.

US New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo plans to sue social networking site Tagged.com for allegedly stealing the identities of its members, raiding their e-mail contact lists and sending out spam in a bid to lure recipients to the site.

Read the full story here on the EWeek Europe website.

A federal class action claims Express Scripts allowed unknown people to gain confidential information of its members. The lead plaintiff claims Express Scripts got an extortion letter in October 2008, threatening to publish confidential information of millions of Express Scripts members on the Internet.

The letter included confidential information of 75 members, including Social Security numbers and prescription information, the suit states.

Named plaintiff John Amburgy claims Express Scripts waited nearly a month to issue a vague statement on its Web site on Nov. 6, 2008 and a second statement on Nov. 11, that admitted some Express Scripts members had received similar letters. Express Scripts announced that it knows where the information was accessed but was still investigating how it was accessed, the suit states. But five months later, Express Scripts still has not announced how many members have had their confidential information compromised, the suit states.

Read the full story here on the Courthouse News Service Website.

Only those customers who weren’t reimbursed for fraudulent charges may sue the Hannaford Bros. supermarket chain over a data breach that exposed 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers to computer hackers, a federal judge ruled.

The decision by U.S. District Judge D. Brock Hornby on Tuesday dismissed all but one of the civil claims brought against Hannaford after the data breach was revealed in March 2008. But a separate lawsuit is still pending in Florida against Hannaford’s sister company, Tampa-based Sweetbay.

Between Dec. 7, 2007, and March 10, 2008, hackers accessed card numbers used at 165 Hannaford stores in the Northeast and 106 Sweetbay stores in Florida. At least 1,800 numbers were stolen and used for unauthorized purchases, Hannaford officials have said.

Electronic payment processing services for the transactions took place in Maine, where Hannaford is based. And lawyers agreed last month that Maine law should apply.

Read the full story here on the Bangor Daily News website.

As many as 100,000 patients of Peninsula Orthopaedic Associates are being warned to protect themselves against identity theft after tapes containing patient information were stolen.

In a letter mailed this week, Chief Executive Officer Brian K. Mathias told patients they should place 90-day fraud alerts on their accounts at the three major credit bureaus.

Patients also were advised to keep an eye on benefits statements from their health insurance companies since they may also be at risk for medical identity theft.

"What a mess," said Ann Suthkowski of Salisbury, who was treated at Peninsula Orthopaedic more than two years ago for bone fractures.

Suthkowski said she planned to give copies of the letter to her attorney and her health insurer as a precaution.

Read the full story here on the Delmarva Media Group website.

Technology-company shareholders have reached a $586 million settlement with dozens of leading Wall Street firms in a long-running class-action lawsuit alleging that the banks manipulated the market for initial public offerings of stock during the late 1990s and 2000.

The settlement, reached April 1 and still subject to court approval, is due to be paid by dozens of banks and brokerage firms, including Credit Suisse Group's Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Deutsche Bank AG's Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley.  Insurers for tech companies that issued stock during the relevant period also will contribute to the settlement. Court filings didn't disclose how much will be paid by each defendant.

Read the full story here on the Wall Street Journal website.

Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz. USA Today. 2009/01/29. Page A1.  According to security specialists, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the fear and confusion created by the current crisis in financial markets by instigating a massive wave of Internet-based schemes to steal personal data and carry out fraud.

The Internet security firm Panda Security reports that the number of malicious programs on the Internet tripled to over 31,000 a day in mid-September, when the U.S. financial sector collapsed.  Ryan Sherstobitoff, a spokesman with  Panda, said, "The criminal economy is closely interrelated with our own economy.  Criminal organizations closely watch market performance and adapt as needed to ensure maximum profit."  Specialists predict that the increase in cybercrimes could accelerate.

Organized groups have become better at assembling massive networks of infected computers, called botnets, and using them to gather large caches of stolen information.  This lengthy article provides a number of examples of cybercrimes and reports on the efforts of Internet sites, the FBI and the Secret Service to combat cybercrimes.

Click here for the full article.

Reported data breaches in the US during 2008 were up 47% on the previous year, to 656, of which 78 affected financial institutions, according to a study from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC).

The ITRC breaks down its figures into five sectors - business, educational, government/military, health and financial/credit. Financial services accounted for the fewest number of breaches - 78, or 11.9% of the total.

"The financial, banking and credit industries have remained the most proactive groups in terms of data protection," says the ITRC.

The ITRC says at least 35.7 million records were potentially breached but the true figure is likely to be far higher because 41.9% of cases went unreported or undisclosed.

Even deleted e-mail messages are public records if they deal with official business, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

In a unanimous ruling, justices ordered commissioners in Seneca County to scour their computer hard drives for e-mail messages requested by a Toledo newspaper last year that had been deleted.

In September, the Ohio Supreme Court denied a Columbus lawyer's request for thousands of messages from two state representatives. Justices did not address the question of whether the lawmakers would need to produce e-mail and text messages from their private accounts that dealt with public business.

In its ruling yesterday, the Supreme Court said e-mail messages dealing with government business are public records regardless of whether they come from a public or private account.

The court also said deleting messages doesn't automatically take them out of the public realm, as long as they can be retrieved. The Seneca County board of commissioners didn't say that the messages couldn't be recovered.

The Blade sought messages that dealt with the possible demolition of an historic courthouse in Tiffin.

Two of the three Seneca County commissioners produced no e-mail messages on the topic, while a third had substantial gaps in the dates of messages, according to evidence presented in the case.

Justice Paul E. Pfeifer, who wrote the Supreme Court's opinion, noted that the commissioners couldn't be ordered to produce records that don't exist -- but the e-mails do exist, if only deep in the recesses of computer drives.

Read the article on the Columbus Dispatch website.

"The use of technology is interwoven into the agency procedures and practices. It is more often the failure or lack of use of the technology that leads to the agency finding themselves in the unfortunate position of being unable to provide a strong defense against a[n] [errors and omissions] claim, "says Sabrena Sally, CPCU, senior vice president of commercial insurance with Westport Insurance Corporation, a subsidiary of Swiss Re, one of the largest writers of insurance agents' errors and omissions coverage.

Sally talked with Insurance Journal recently about the additional errors and omissions exposures created by the use, misuse and lack of use of current technology by agents; providing great insight into the exposures analyzed during the underwriting process related to insurance agency technology.

Read the full article here on the MyNewMarkets.Com website.

An unhappy guest at a Pembroke Pines resort described the hotel as filthy and bug-infested.

A dissatisfied patient of a Lauderhill cosmetic surgery clinic warned people to "avoid this place like the plague."

The reviews are just two of the thousands posted daily on the Internet about everything from fast-food restaurants to nursery schools. They also have something else in common.

Both have sparked libel lawsuits.

Increasingly, businesses are turning to the courts to combat online reviews they say could cost them customers, legal experts say. In some instances, the businesses get court orders to track down people who posted anonymously.

Read the full article here on the BusinessWeek website.

A group of irked Facebook members filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook Tuesday that said the company's controversial Beacon advertising program violates several laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).

Beacon, which launched in late 2007, basically tracked the activity of Facebook members on certain partner sites and then posted an item in users' news feeds when they purchased something.

Bought movie tickets on Fandango, or new shoes on overstock.com? If you failed to click "no" on a blink-and-you-miss-it notice during checkout, your Facebook newsfeed would soon read "Chloe bought Dark Knight on Fandango."

That might not seem too harmful, but what if you bought tickets to "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" on Fandango or a copy of "He's Just Not That Into You" on overstock.com? Suddenly, all 200 of our closest "friends" are privy to that information.

The FBI on Friday arrested a former Countrywide Financial Corp. employee and another man in an alleged scheme to steal and sell sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, of as many as 2 million mortgage applicants.

The breach in security, which occurred over a two-year period though July, was one of the largest in years, experts said.

The insider was identified as Rene L. Rebollo Jr., 36, who had worked as a senior financial analyst at Full Spectrum Lending, Countrywide's subprime lending division. He was arrested at his home in Pasadena and charged with unauthorized access to a financial institution's computers.

In the first case of its type that I have seen, a city employee in San Francisco has actually locked up access to a full network and refused to give anyone else access. Here is the story from Yahoo! Tech:

A network administrator has locked up a multimillion dollar computer system for San Francisco that handles sensitive data and is refusing to give police the password, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.

The employee, 43-year-old Terry Childs, was arrested Sunday. He gave some passwords to police, which did not work, and refused to reveal the real code, the paper reported.

The new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network) handles city payroll files, jail bookings, law enforcement documents and official e-mail for San Francisco. The network is functioning but administrators have little or no access.

Childs, who remains in custody, is accused of improperly tampering with computer systems and causing a denial of service, said Kamala Harris, San Francisco's district attorney, on Monday afternoon.

"The bail has been set at $5 million, and the exposure in this case if he were convicted on all counts would be seven years in prison," Harris said.

Harris said it's unknown why Childs tampered with the system. The Chronicle, however, reported that Childs was disciplined recently for poor performance. Childs worked in the Department of Technology for San Francisco, making close to US$150,000 a year, the paper reported.

City officials told the paper that Childs may have caused millions in damage while also rigging the network so that other third parties could monitor traffic, posing a huge data security risk. He is also alleged to have installed a tracing system to monitor communications related to his personnel case.

As part of its $1 billion lawsuit against user-video site YouTube, Viacom willreceive a complete log of all users’ activities, which will include a list of usernames, IP addresses, and videos that each account has viewed in the past.

Viacom says it wants to use the data to prove that copyright-infringing videos draw higher amounts of traffic than user-generated and fully-legal content. If Viacom’s hypothesis turns out to be true, it could increase penalties against YouTube if found liable for contributory copyright infringement.

Read the full article here on the DailyTech website.

For quite some time, the largest retailer of Music in the United States has been Wal-Mart.   That is no longer the case.  The leader in this category is now…Apple.  That’s correct.  On-line retailing of music has just become the number one way to buy songs in the United States.

It puts an interesting spin on what comes next for the record industry.  Read about that spin here on The Motley Fool website.

A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for invasion of privacy. Not for the untold amounts of information that can be dug up using the Google search logarithms, but instead for the “Street View” feature of the Google Maps.

(Street View is a tool used when looking on maps of various neighborhoods that show actual pictures of locations when you use Google Maps. Want to see the PLUS Office? Type in 5353 Wayzata Boulevard, 55416 in the search box here on Google Mapsand then click “Street View”)

Aaron and Christine Boring have accused Google of an intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion of seclusion and privacy. The larger question is what technology will be the first to cross the line and give insurers fits? You can read the full article (and see copies of the pleading) here on the Smoking Gun website.

This is a great article from BusinessWeek Online that talks about Rick Frenkel, the patent attorney working for Cisco Systems who in his spare time kept an anonymous blog titled “Patent Troll* Tracker”.

He was posting anonymously, making examples of those “Trolls” who were abusing the system and even calling into question the ethical practices of some attorneys. Finally, a bounty of $15,000 was offered to anyone who could identify the mystery blogger, and he was forced to reveal his identity after he was discovered by an internet sleuth.

The interesting part of this story is how it illustrates the questions and risks related to blogging (whether anonymous or not) and not just to the blogger, but the company that employs them.

*“Patent Trolls” is a derogatory term used to describe businesses that make money purchasing patents and then suing big companies for infringement.