The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Red Flags Rule, an unprecedented move in the federal government’s fight against id theft, has once again seen its deadline for nationwide compliance pushed back to accommodate requests from Congress.

Part of staying at the forefront of fraud prevention is examining the vulnerabilities on both the business and consumer side of everyday transactions.

By now, most everyone is familiar with the basic principals of fraudulent e mails, or "phishing" e-mails, that attempt to fool recipients into surrendering personal information.

In times of great need, there will always be those who take advantage of the generosity of others. This week’s tragic Haitian earthquake is no exception. Genuine charitable relief funds have successfully raised millions to help those struggling to recover; while no specific scams have been named as of yet, past tragedies have shown that fraudulent “charities” will inevitably surface to exploit those looking to help, resulting in identity fraud.

Exploits and vulnerabilities in commercially available software products are addressed in a cycle of trial and error that is common to the software industry. Errors are often discovered and disclosed by independent research firms and then reported back to the original product vendor for patching. This cycle of testing and correction usually leads to the repair of exploitations used by hackers and cyber criminals to conduct identity theft, identity fraud, and illicit business online. However, according to Brian Krebs of krebsonsecurity.com, one research firm has announced that it has lost patience with the vendors it has been servicing and will release its database of undocumented software exploits to the public between now and February 1.

The New Year promises to be one of many challenges for all facets of the business world. Fraud prevention and security issues are already at the forefront of 2010 planning for many businesses, especially for organizations providing banking and financial services. The focus comes with little surprise, as fraudsters and cybercriminals so often target those within the financial sector. For this reason, the importance of enhanced security, comprehensive federal compliance and fraud prevention services for these organizations cannot be emphasized enough.

The Adobe PDF file is a standard method of information delivery in the business world. Presentations, white papers, sales literature, promotional materials and everything in between rely on PDFs to ensure clean, professional and universally readable transmissions of information. So, this past Monday’s announcement that Adobe’s Acrobat and PDF reader software are both being exploited by malicious programming came as an important advisory to businesses worldwide.