DigitalTransactionsNews reports that one-fifth of financial institutions are using technologies that can authenticate email messages, even though phishing attacks disproportionately affect banks and even though banks say they plan to rely more heavily on the e-mail channel to reach customers.

New research from Aite Group LLC, a Boston-based researcher, says that phishing attacks are affecting a wider array of businesses, including smaller institutions. These companies could suffer if their e-mail messages come to be disregarded by wary consumers, says the company.

Just 20% of banks covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. use technology that can increase recipients’ assurance that e-mail messages are legitimate, the report says, relying on survey data from the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance. By contrast, 51% of Fortune 500 consumer companies do. Such technology, for example, allows recipients to check whether a given e-mail message comes from a trusted Internet Protocol address.

According to ChannelWeb, Microsoft has made changes to the Windows Live platform that allow members of five social networking sites—Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn and Tagged—to securely transfer contacts between them.

John Richards, director of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform, wrote that the shift gives users more control over their data and eliminates the need for data sharing techniques such as “screen-scraping,” which is often used to rip data from the screens showing friends’ lists. Scraping, Richards said, “unduly puts customers at risk for phishing attacks, identity fraud and spam.”

The partnerships with Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn and Tagged make it easier, safer and more secure for people to have access to their contacts and relationships from more places online.

Identity thieves are combining identity theft and mortgage fraud to steal people’s houses right from under them. The FBI has issued a warning, saying that a few cases have been reported where thieves find house, figure out who owns it, assume their identity, forge signatures on the paperwork, get the deed transferred to themselves, and then sell it and run off. In some cases, victims are stuck with mortgage on a house they no longer own.

Here are the FBI’s tips for preventing this crime:
• If you receive a payment book or information from a mortgage company that’s not yours, whether your name is on the envelope or not, open it, figure out what it says, and follow up with the company that sent it.
• Regularly check all information pertaining to your house through your county’s deeds office. If you see any paperwork you don’t recognize or any signature that is not yours, look into it.

Bloomberg reports that confidential passport files of all three presidential candidates were breached by State Department employees. The private data of Democratic Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain were accessed in separate incidents, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

“We’re going to do a full investigation,” McCormack said today. “We take very seriously the trust that is put in us” to safeguard personal data, he said. He said earlier that the breaches might have been “imprudent curiosity.”

The State Department last night announced that two contract employees were fired and a third was disciplined for accessing Obama’s passport data.

“Our initial view is this was imprudent curiosity on the part of these three individuals,” McCormack said last night. Still, the State Department was taking steps “to assure ourselves that it is nothing more than that.”

According to Tri-CityHerald.com, identity thieves and spyware purveyors will have a harder time in Washington as a result of several bills that passed the Legislature this year.

The spyware bill closes loopholes in the state’s laws and makes it easier to prosecute people illegally installing spyware onto consumer’s computers, said Janelle Guthrie, with the state Attorney General’s Office.

Identity theft cases will also be easier to prosecute because one bill allows records from out-of-state businesses that are related to an identity theft case to be authenticated by an affidavit rather than a person having to travel to verify the documents in person.
And another bill requires police departments to file reports for identity theft victims, as well as allowing separate charges to be filed for each use of stolen personal information.