Reuters has an interesting article about Valentin Boanta who is serving a five year sentence in Romania for his role in ATM skimming.  Valentin started to work on new technology for ATMs to defeat skimmers illicitly installed on ATMs to read card numbers which has won an award from International Exhibition of Inventions:

"All ATMs have ageing designs so they are prone to vulnerability, they are a very weak side of the banking industry," he said.

"Every ATM can be penetrated through a skimming crime. My security solution, SRS, makes an ATM unbreachable."

Boanta says his "Secure Revolving System-SRS" can be installed in any ATM. It allows the bank card to be inserted longer side first and then rotates it to prevent skimmers being able to lock on to the magnetic data strip. The system returns the card to its user with a reverse rotation.

Outwardly it is a trapezoidal metallic box around 6 inches long with the card slot in the middle.

The SRS, funded and developed by a technology firm near Bucharest called MB Telecom, is patented and won an award this year at the International Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva. The inventor and company are not yet saying how much it will cost, but insist it will be available soon.

"He fully deserves such recognition," said SRS co-inventor and MB Telecom president Mircea Tudor. "He's taking part in improving Romania's image abroad and he'll surely join our team when released." 

Microsoft, a major contributor to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) announced compliance with part one of the Application Security ISO 27034 standards published in November, 2011.  The five reaming parts of ISO 27034 are still currently works in progress by the SC27 ISO technical committee:

“This standard provides clear requirements, benchmarks and examples of secure development processes,” said Scott Charney (pictured), corporate vice-president of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing (TwC).

“It provides software buyers and developers a way to talk about secure development processes in a structured way,” he told attendees of the Security Development Conference 2013 in San Francisco.

Lack of Secure Software Development Lifecycle training and methodologies for application development processes leave applications vulnerable.  An article on the findings from the recent (ISC)2 2013 Global Information Security Workforce Study:

In a release published Tuesday, (ISC)2 -- the security industry's largest professional association -- cited data from its recent 2013 Global Information Security Workforce Study, in which 69 percent of security pros rated application vulnerabilities as a high concern -- the highest rating of any threat in the survey.

Insecure software was a contributor in approximately one-third of attributable security breaches, according to the (ISC)2 study.

The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is a FBI, National White Collar Crime Center, and Bureau of Justice Assistance milti-agency task force.  The IC3 released their annual Internet Crime Report for 2012 yesterday.  From the IC3 press-release:

The 2012 Internet Crime Report—a summary of reported fraudulent activity, including data and statistics. In 2012, the IC3 received and processed 289,874 complaints, averaging more than 24,000 complaints per month. Unverified losses reported to IC3 rose 8.3 percent over the previous year.