When RockYou.com’s servers were breached last month, 32 million passwords were stolen and posted on the Internet. RockYou committed a grave error by storing them in clear text instead of encrypting them. Security researchers at Imperva analyzed the findings and came up with some interesting findings, among them that the most popular password is “123456”, more »

Three men have been indicted in what federal authorities are calling the largest identity theft case ever prosecuted. The three men are accused of hacking into the files of Heartland Payment Systems between October 2006 and May 2008. Heartland processes debit and credit card payment for over a quarter of a million businesses. Some of the breaches occurred at 7-Eleven and Hannaford Brothers and at least 650 financial institutions were affected.

The FTC and SEC, along with several other federal agencies, are investigating the data breach at Heartland Payment Systems. The company processes about 100 million credit card transactions a month. Over 250,000 merchant locations were affected by the breach, which involved hackers stealing unencrypted data such as addresses, debit, and credit card numbers, and expiration dates. The company has also been hit with a class action lawsuit.

Company President and Chief Financial Officer Robert Baldwin Jr. disclosed the investigations during Heartland’s quarterly conference call with investigators Tuesday, saying that the SEC had launched an informal inquiry into the company and that there is also a related investigation by the Department of Justice. The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which regulates national banks and their service providers, has launched an inquiry, as has the FTC, he said.