Financial institutions and companies now have an online resourceto share information and research best practices when it comes topreventing fraud and security breaches.

Intersections, a provider of consumer and corporateidentity-risk management services, has launched a Web 2.0 site,BreachCenter.com. The free site is designed as a place wherefinancial institutions can go to get articles, white papers andcase studies on data breaches and also as a forum to contributeinput and share stories.

The forum section of the site will feature a question thatIntersections poses to get public response.
The first question currently posted on the site is, “What should anideal identity theft victim assistance service include?”

In the forum section, visitors can add content to share withother viewers. Visitors can also create special sections to postspecific information, such as a section specifically for creditunions to share how they respond to breaches.

As a resource, Breach Center has a guide, “Seven Steps to DataBreach Readiness,” posted as well as a summary of all consumeridentification laws. The site also has sample data breach responsepolicies, sample notification letters and reviews of breachprevention products.

“We noticed that no matter how much time and attention financialinstitutions and companies were giving breach prevention, thenumber of actual breaches were still going up. Out of all thebreach response and readiness resources out there, we found thatthere were very few that focused on the human side of breachresponse. We wanted to serve that need,” said John Scanlon,executive vice president/chief operating officer atIntersections.

After coming up with the idea for Breach Center, Intersectionspartnered with the Financial Services Roundtable and the IdentityTheft Assistance Center to bring it all together.

Intersections and the Identity Theft Assistance Center hadalready partnered in the past to create the ITAC Sentinel line ofidentity theft protection products that combined Intersections'identity-theft prevention and detection services with ITAC's victimassistance services.

In January, Intersections and ITAC partnered with CUNA to createan ITAC Sentinel product for credit unions to offer members.Scanlon said that they have a few contracts with credit unions thatwill be rolling out the product soon.

Visitors to the Breach Center site will also have access toITAC's blog, which features posts from ITAC leaders, members andpartners on identity-theft and identity-management news.
The site also has a running ticker of the latest breaches to keepvisitors up to date with the latest information.

Intersections will work as the site manager and maintain theoverall site by posting information and monitoring the forum. Tostart, Scanlon said that the site will have a forum policy based ontrust.

“The site is meant to be a community forum, and we want to doeverything we can to make it assessible to everyone. We will trustthe community to post appropriately to the forum, and if a problemoccurs we will reexamine the policy.”

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