The latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report is out, and the good news is: The number of compromised records is down. The troubling news is: The number of breaches is up. Bryan Sartin, one of the report authors, explains why.

The Heartland hacker says the U.S. government was aware of his illegal activities, and an ID security expert talks about phishing threats in the wake of the Epsilon breach.

Altra Federal Credit Union developed a calculated strategy before moving to the cloud -- advice all financial institutions should follow, says Brian Boettcher, VP of IT, who shares his lessons learned.

The bad news is that banks and businesses have not made great progress in the fight against account takeover fraud. The good news is: They have the strategies and tools to win this fight in 2011.

As Congress and the White House look for ways to cut the federal budget, one area that could prove dicey is IT security, contends Department of Homeland Security's Philip Reitinger.

ID security expert Tim Rohrbaugh on phishing trends in light of Epsilon breach.

Experts say banks and retailers are doing all they can to control concerns in the aftermath of the Epsilon e-mail breach, and a well-crafted e-mail fooled an RSA employee into opening a phish that led to a sophisticated attack on the company's information systems.

Philip Reitinger, the top cybersecurity official in the Department of Homeland Security, is on a mission to help create a new, secure computing ecosystem on the Internet.

When it comes to e-marketing and the reliance on third parties such as Epsilon, Nicolas Christin of Carnegie Mellon University says banks and merchants should "come clean" about the information they share with outside entities.

Privacy Attorney Lisa Sotto says the Epsilon e-mail breach is a warning about the state of data security employed by some third-party service providers. Strong contracts related to security practices must be the norm, not the exception.