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U.S. Secret Service Warns ID Thieves are Abusing USPS's Mail Scanning Service — Krebs on Security
A year ago, KrebsOnSecurity warned that “Informed Delivery,” a new offering from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) that lets residents view scanned images of all incoming mail, was likely to be abused by identity thieves and other fraudsters unless the USPS beefed up security around the program and made it easier for people to opt out. This week, the U.S. Secret Service issued an internal alert warning that many of its field offices have reported crooks are indeed using Informed Delivery to commit various identity theft and credit card fraud schemes.
The internal alert — sent by the Secret Service on Nov. 6 to its law enforcement partners nationwide — references a recent case in Michigan in which seven people were arrested for allegedly stealing credit cards from resident mailboxes after signing up as those victims at the USPS’s Web site.
According to the Secret Service alert, the accused used the Informed Delivery feature “to identify and intercept mail, and to further their identity theft fraud schemes.”
“Fraudsters were also observed on criminal forums discussing using the Informed Delivery service to surveil potential identity theft victims,” the Secret Service memo reads.
The USPS did not respond to repeated requests for comment over the past six days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @10:57AM
USPS and California State DMV would have both had that information. And at least the latter I know ran their own database system because it was extremely slow running off a mainframe with batch processing and dialup/frame relay links up until the past 10 years or so (I talked to a couple DMV people in regards to how long I should expect my paperwork processing to take, who were more than willing to explain roughly what the system was like.) That said, they were moving to an internet accessable web front end back then, and had only been delayed in it due to budget cuts for the decade prior. As a result they probably have a shoddy IE6 compatible HTML 4.01+Javascript hackjob that has holes out the wazoo in it. No fault of their own, just a bad time and opportunity to upgrade their systems into the 21st century. As I remember it the mainframe was going to be software emulated in a VM as well.