Finance life
March 13, 2012
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi called on banks and governments to make the most of a lull in the sovereign debt crisis as he seeks to get the ECB back to its main job of ensuring price stability.
Policy makers
March 10, 2012
LMI Aerospace posted larger profit and revenue in the fourth quarter, but the St. Charles-based maker of aircraft parts said today it has trimmed its full-year forecast for 2012 revenue.
LMI reported a net income of $4.1 million, or 35 cents a share, compared to $3.1 million, or 26 cents a share, in the fourt quarter of 2011. Sales rose 19 percent to $65 million.
The company reduced its 2012 revenue forcast to a range of $282 million to $298 million versus an earlier forecast of $290 million to $308 million due to certain program delays in its aerostructures business no teletrek payday advance.
March 8, 2012
The U.S. Justice Department has warned Apple and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them, accusing them of colluding to raise the prices of electronic books, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Several parties have held talks to settle the potential antitrust case, the paper cited the people as saying. It added that a successful settlement could lead to cheaper e-books for consumers.
However, not all publishers are in settlement discussions, the Journal said.
The five publishers identified in the Journal report are Simon & Schuster Inc, a unit of CBS Corp, Lagardere SCA
March 7, 2012
The IRS is cracking down on scammers promising elderly and low-income churchgoers "free money" by urging them to claim fraudulent tax refunds.
The nationwide scheme, which reaches victims through flyers and online advertisements, claims taxpayers can receive non-existent Social Security refunds or other tax rebates and credits for which they don’t qualify. The con artists often tell taxpayers that they don’t even need the proper paperwork to claim the refunds.
The "free money" plots tend to target people with such low incomes that they aren’t required to file taxes, so the victims are caught off guard when they are told they are missing out on lucrative credits and refunds. Once they file the returns for their victims, the promoters collect steep fees for their "services" and run off with the money, the IRS said.
"In the end, the victims discover their claims are rejected or the refund barely exceeds what they paid the promoter. Meanwhile, their money and the promoters are long gone," an IRS spokeswoman said.
Even if a taxpayer hires a preparer to submit a return and has no idea they are part of a scam, they are still legally responsible for the information in their return and will therefore be required to repay any money they receive fraudulently, the IRS said.
One scheme that has been especially rampant this tax season promises senior citizens they can get refunds or stimulus payments based on the American Opportunity Tax Credit, a credit for college students or parents paying tuition and expenses. However, many of the senior citizens claiming the credit haven’t seen the inside of a classroom in years, the IRS said. Another variation falsely informs people that they can claim the college credit to offset taxes they’ve paid on groceries.
The IRS said refund-related tax scams like these spiked last summer and have spread from Virginia and the Southern United States to the Midwest. Generally, they have been less prevalent in the West and Northeast.
Churchgoers are among the most common targets, the IRS said.
IRS: Beware of ‘dirty dozen’ tax scams
"Promoters are targeting church congregations, exploiting their good intentions and credibility. They build false hopes and charge people good money for bad advice," said an IRS spokeswoman.
Betty Yee, a member of the California Board of Equalization, the government agency in charge of the state’s tax administration, said these scams have been showing up in Fresno, Sacramento, Stockton and the San Francisco Bay Area. They have been especially prevalent among ethnic minorities, namely the Southeast Asian community.
Last year, local community churches and organizations reported that scammers were conning residents in Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Hmong communities into thinking they were eligible for the Making Work Pay tax — a payroll credit of up to $400 per worker — when many of them weren’t even working, Yee said.
They would allegedly approach some victims in person and speak to them in their native language, often claiming to represent a non-profit tax assistance organization, said Yee. Other con artists would send flyers and paperwork to churches, and the churches would distribute them to members, thinking that they were legitimate advertisements for tax professionals.
"They go through churches because people trust church officials," said Yee. "But particularly for low-income communities, there are free resources to help them with tax issues — they shouldn’t be looking to pay someone a fee. That’s a big warning sign."
Because of ongoing investigations, the IRS won’t reveal details about the number of scams being perpetrated and the names of the specific churches involved. But the agency said that there are several red flags that people should be wary of.
These include claims that elderly taxpayers can get refunds and rebates based on excess or withheld Social Security benefits and claims that Treasury Form 1080 can be used to transfer funds from the Social Security Administration to the IRS and result in a payout to taxpayers.
The $13,000 adoption tax credit is back!
Consumers should also be skeptical of any unfamiliar for-profit tax services that team up with local churches, as well as homemade flyers and brochures that suggest credits or refunds are available with little or no documentation. Some of these scammers advertise that low income taxpayers can file their returns with catch lines like, "Low Income — No Documents Tax Returns," implying that low-income earners can get refunds without supplying necessary documentation and proof of eligibility.
The IRS has been trying to raise public awareness by issuing nationwide alerts, and alerting individual churches to be on watch for con artists.
March 5, 2012
Only the most “dire of circumstances” should spur the U.S. Federal Reserve to buy more assets, and that is unlikely, a top central bank official on Monday.
Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, an outspoken policy hawk, said he was “perplexed” by Wall Street’s continued preoccupation with the possibility that the Fed will engage in a third round of large-scale asset purchases, known as quantitative easing, or QE3.
“I believe adding to the accommodative doses we have applied rather than beginning to wean the patient might be the equivalent of medical malpractice,” he said in prepared remarks to the Dallas Regional Chamber payday loan lenders.
“It is my opinion that we should run that risk only in the most dire of circumstances, and I presently do not see those circumstances.”
Fisher, who does not have a vote on the central bank’s policy-setting committee this year, added that recent economic data indicate improving growth and prospects for job creation this year, though price stability is being “challenged” by higher gasoline prices.
budget, management - Comments closed
March 4, 2012
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President John Williams said the Fed should maintain an
March 2, 2012
The number one way hackers get into protected systems isn’t through a fancy technical exploit. It’s by guessing the password.
That’s not too hard when the most common password used on business systems is "Password1."
There’s a technical reason for Password1’s popularity: It’s got an upper-case letter, a number and nine characters. That satisfies the complexity rules for many systems, including the default settings for Microsoft’s (, Fortune 500) widely used Active Directory identity management software.
Security services firm Trustwave spotlighted the "Password1" problem in its recently released "2012 Global Security Report," which summarizes the firm’s findings from nearly 2 million network vulnerability scans and 300 recent security breach investigations.
Around 5% of passwords involve a variation of the word "password," the company’s researchers found. The runner-up, "welcome," turns up in more than 1%.
Easily guessable or entirely blank passwords were the most common vulnerability Trustwave’s SpiderLabs unit found in its penetration tests last year on clients’ systems. The firm set an assortment of widely available password-cracking tools loose on 2.5 million passwords, and successfully broke more than 200,000 of them.
Verizon came up with similar results in its 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, one of the security industry’s most comprehensive annual studies. The full report will be released in several months, but Verizon (, Fortune 500) previewed some of its findings at this week’s RSA conference in San Francisco.
Exploiting weak or guessable passwords was the top method attackers used to gain access last year. It played a role in 29% of the security breaches Verizon’s response team investigated.
Verizon’s scariest finding was that attackers are often inside victims’ networks for months or years before they’re discovered. Less than 20% of the intrusions Verizon studied were discovered within days, let alone hours.
Even scarier: Few companies discovered the breach on their own. More than two-thirds learned they’d been attacked only after an external party, such as a law-enforcement agency, notified them. Trustwave’s findings were almost identical: Only 16% of the cases it investigated last year were internally detected.
So if your password is something guessable, what’s the best way to make it more secure? Make it longer.
Adding complexity to your password — swapping "password" for "p@S$w0rd" — protects against so-called "dictionary" attacks, which automatically check against a list of standard words.
But attackers are increasingly using brute-force tools that simply cycle through all possible character combinations. Length is the only effective guard against those. A seven-character password has 70 trillion possible combinations; an eight-character password takes that to more than 6 quadrillion.
Even a few quadrillion options isn’t a big deal for modern machines, though. Using a $1,500 computer built with off-the-shelf parts, it took Trustwave just 10 hours to harvest its 200,000 broken passwords.
"We’ve got to get ourselves using stuff larger than human memory capacity," independent security researcher Dan Kaminsky said during an RSA presentation on why passwords don’t work.
He acknowledged that it’s an uphill fight. Biometric authentication, smartcards, one-time key generators and other solutions can increase security, but at the cost of adding complexity.
"The fundamental win of the password over every other authentication technology is its utter simplicity on every device," Kaminsky said. "This is, of course, also their fundamental failing."
finance, management - Comments closed
February 29, 2012
The cascade of U.S. and European sanctions imposed on Iran is crippling its ability to export oil and conduct trade, hitting the Gulf state
February 28, 2012
The Costa Crociere cruise line says the crippled Costa Allegra, being towed by a fishing boat, will reach land on Wednesday, when it arrives at a tiny Seychelles island.
The Italian company said in a statement Tuesday that the Allegra, with 636 passengers and more than 400 crew members, is due to reach Desroches, an exclusive resort island of sandy beaches, a day after the French vessel Trevignon came to its rescue, following a fire-sparked power outage. It also said a helicopter is flying to the Allegra now with food, satellite phones and short-wave radios.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
ROME (AP) _ The Costa Crociere cruise line says the crippled Costa Allegra, being towed by a fishing boat, will reach land on Wednesday, when it arrives at a tiny Seychelles island.
The Italian company said in a statement Tuesday that the Allegra, with 636 passengers and more than 400 crew members, is due to reach Desroches, an exclusive resort island of sandy beaches, a day after the French vessel Trevignon came to its rescue, following a fire-sparked power outage. It also said a helicopter is flying to the Allegra now with food, satellite phones and short-wave radios.