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

Intersections, a provider of consumer and corporate identity-risk management services, has launched a Web 2.0 site, BreachCenter.com. The free site is designed as a place where financial institutions can go to get articles, white papers and case studies on data breaches and also as a forum to contribute input and share stories.

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

In the forum section, visitors can add content to share with other viewers. Visitors can also create special sections to post specific information, such as a section specifically for credit unions to share how they respond to breaches.

As a resource, Breach Center has a guide, “Seven Steps to Data Breach Readiness,” posted as well as a summary of all consumer identification laws. The site also has sample data breach response policies, sample notification letters and reviews of breach prevention products.

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

After coming up with the idea for Breach Center, Intersections partnered with the Financial Services Roundtable and the Identity Theft Assistance Center to bring it all together.

Intersections and the Identity Theft Assistance Center had already partnered in the past to create the ITAC Sentinel line of identity theft protection products that combined Intersections' identity-theft prevention and detection services with ITAC's victim assistance services.

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

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

Intersections will work as the site manager and maintain the overall site by posting information and monitoring the forum. To start, Scanlon said that the site will have a forum policy based on trust.

“The site is meant to be a community forum, and we want to do everything we can to make it assessible to everyone. We will trust the community to post appropriately to the forum, and if a problem occurs we will reexamine the policy.”

–lsiegriest@cutimes.com

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Intersections Launches Community Security Portal to Share Information

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