Thanksgiving Day Macy’s Parade Oops.

Parade viewers were surprised to find shredded police report information with addition to the normal parade confetti. In a strange twist Confetti collected by spectators near 65th Street and Central Park West revealed arrest records, incident reports and personal information and that identified undercover officers. There was also information of Mitt Romney's motorcade route to and from the final presidential debate at Hofstra University.

From an interview with WPIX. "There are phone numbers, addresses, more Social Security numbers, license plate numbers," said Ethan Finkelstein, 18, of Manhattan, who gathered up some of the confetti with friends. "And then we find all these incident reports from police."

An investigation in to how this happened has discovered the records that landed on spectators at Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade were brought by a Nassau County Police Academy department employee. The employee has not been named by investigators.

Nassau County Police are considering upgrading to cross cut shredders for future use. Macy’s confirmed that the confetti used for the parade, supplied by Macy’s, is colored paper.

 

 

Retailers beware:

With the approach the holiday season, retailer’s and merchants will need to be diligent in watching over their operations. Identity thieves, scammers, hackers, and others criminal types will be going full-fledged during the holidays. They will be counting of the hustle and bustle to allow them to penetrate Point Of Sale systems across the country. They will use any tool they can, from virus to converting an employee, to steal the data that they want.

The scary part is that when they are successful the backlash at the merchant will be intense. For each merchant system that is compromised there will be questions and complaints as to how this could and did happen. The business that doesn’t have the correct answers, or failed to observe some security step, will in the end answer these ugly questions in a court of law.

POS Warning

In an article “Why Data Theft Experts Recommend Paying in Cash”, by Byron Acohido, published in USA Today the experts talk about the dangers of debit card theft. They also bring up the growing problem of POS terminal attacks. What they don’t talk about is how the public is going to respond to the exposure.

If you are a business owner or the manager of a store in a chain, you now have a duty to your company and customers to look at those terminals every day. The thieves are slick at what they do so you will need to be more vigilant in watching for tampering. If you suspect tampering, take that terminal off line and have it checked out. The first time it comes to light that a POS terminal was used, after being suspected, there might be a very ugly outcry from customers. There may even be action from attorneys against the store and or company.

For those companies and managers who don’t feel the need to be watchful and claim ignorance there will be an attorney who will clearly address the lack of due diligence. Business owners and leaders need to understand that these attacks are becoming more common the need for greater effort on their part is required.

The last part of the article brought up the age old advice that maybe people should carry and use cash. When people carried cash they were subjected to the threat of robbery. Now they need to be concerned about using a debit card. I stand by my position that consumers need to use credit cards for all transactions because of the higher legal safe guards of credit cards. I still believe that you should carry an ATM (only)card only for getting cash when you need it. The debit card is a direct pipe line into your bank account and can cause significant problems if it is lost or cloned. The risk versus reward for using a debit card is not good enough for me.