payroll
Latest
A thief took Facebook hard drives with payroll data from a worker's car
It seems Facebook just couldn't make it through to the end of the year without another privacy-related incident. Only this time around, its own employees are affected. A thief broke into a payroll worker's car and stole hard drives that reportedly contained unencrypted payroll information for around 29,000 current and former US employees.
Some companies are already paying employees in Bitcoin, but it's complicated
Direct deposit, stock options and the traditional paycheck are all outmoded: the future of employee wages, apparently, is Bitcoin. At least that's how Bitwage, a virtual currency payroll firm, feels about it. Bitwage reached out to 150 Bitcoin-friendly companies to see how they felt about implementing a Bitcoin-based payroll; of the 38 that responded, nearly half have considered it and about ten percent (read: four companies, after the math) have already done it. It's a novel idea, but the payroll company's own survey highlights some of the problems: the virtual currency isn't recognized as legal tender in most countries, which makes it incompatible with several European wage regulations. Companies would have to deal with the cryptocoin's curious tax status, too -- though Bitwage helpfully points out that there are firms (wink wink, nudge nudge) that can help with that sort of thing.
Two million accounts compromised by 'Pony' botnet, bad passwords
Though most of us cast stones at large-scale corporate password thefts, we ought to be checking our own glass houses, according to a security company called Trustwave. It just revealed that a single attack from a Dutch-based server has resulted in 2 million passwords pilfered from individual users for sites like Facebook and Google. The ne'er-do-well did it using a botnet and hacker program called "Pony," which likely directed the stolen info through a gateway or so-called reverse proxy. Thieves also gained access to an unusually high number of accounts from a single payroll service, which could cause "direct financial repercussions," according to the site. Lest you imagine that complex hacks were involved, though, think again. A commonly used cracking method was "guessing," thanks to poorly chosen passwords like "123456" used by -- wait for it -- 15,820 of the victims.
