may the force be with you

The analysis, released on Wednesday, also found that even in the most dangerous data breaches--where thieves access social security numbers and other sensitive information on consumers they have deliberately targeted--only about 1 in 1,000 victims had their identities stolen.

ID Analytics, the San Diego, Calif.-based fraud detection company that performed the analysis, said it looked at four recent data breaches involving a total of 500,000 consumers. It declined to provide the names of the companies involved in the breaches, but Mike Cook, ID Analytics co-founder, said one of them was a top five U.S. bank.

After six months of study, comparing compromised information against credit applications, ID Analytics said it discovered something counterintuitive: The smaller the breach, the greater the likelihood the information was subsequently used by fraudsters to hijack the identity of victims.

"If you're in a breach of 100, 200 or 250 names, there's a pretty high probability that you're identity is going to be used," said Mike Cook, ID Analytics' co-founder. "The reason for that is if you look at how long it takes a fraudster to use an identity, they can roughly use 100 to 250 in a year. But as the size of the breach grows, it drops off pretty drastically."

A study conducted earlier this year by Javelin Strategy and Research, which mirrored the methodology of an earlier Federal Trade Commission study, found that 9.3 million Americans said they had been victimized by identity thieves during the preceding 12 months.

ID Analytics said it discovered that identity thieves have a hard time using a stolen credit cards to hijack the identity of cardholders. That's because the cards are usually quickly canceled and because piecing together an identity based on the information on the card is hard work. Not one of the card breaches it studied resulted in a subsequent identity takeover.

While the findings will provide some comfort to consumers whose credit cards are lost or lifted, or whose sensitive information is compromised when, for instance, a laptop is stolen, as recently happened at Chicago-based Boeing, some of ID Analytics' suggestions could be controversial.

The company suggests, for instance, that companies shouldn't always notify consumers of data breaches because they may be unnecessarily alarming people who stand little chance of being victimized.

That's likely to rankle consumer watchdogs, who are pushing Congress to enact a law sponsored by Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont. The law would require companies to implement tough data security standards and to notify consumers, law enforcement and credit-reporting agencies whenever there's a breach.

"As far as notifications, we think there are certain instances where businesses might want to notify consumers and certain instances where they might not to inform them," Cook said.

"For instance, if they lose data, and they don't know where it is, we think too many notices may not be a good thing. They should probably monitor that and spend dollars on consumers who are actually harmed, rather than spending dollars on 10 million consumers" most of whom won't be affected, he said.

Story Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

LONDON - Scientists have discovered how cancer spreads from a primary site to other places in the body in a finding that could open doors for new ways of treating and preventing advanced disease.

Instead of a cell just breaking off from a tumor and traveling through the bloodstream to another organ where it forms a secondary tumour, or metastasis, researchers in the United States have shown that the cancer sends out envoys to prepare the new site.

Intercepting those envoys, or blocking their action with drugs, might help to prevent the spread of cancer or to treat it in patients in which it has already occurred.

"We are basically looking at all the earlier steps that are involved in metastasis that we weren't previously aware of. It is complex but we are opening the door to all these things that occur before the tumor cell implants itself," said Professor David Lyden, of Cornell University in New York.

"It is a map to where the metastasis will occur," he added in an interview.

Landing site for cancer cells
Cancer's ability to colonize other organs is what makes the disease so deadly. Once the cancer has spread beyond its original site it is much more difficult to treat.

In research reported in the journal Nature, Lyden and his colleagues describe what happens before the arrival of the cancerous cells at the new site.

"The authors show that tumor cells can mobilize normal bone marrow cells, causing them to migrate to particular regions and change the local environment so as to attract and support a developing metastasis," Patricia Steeg, of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, said in a commentary.

Cells at the site of the metastasis multiply and produce a protein called fibronectin, which acts like a glue to attract and trap the bone marrow cells to create a landing pad or nest for the cancer cells.

"These nests provide attachment factors for the tumor cells to implant and nurture them. It causes them not only to bind but to proliferate. Once that all takes place we have a fully formed metastatic site or secondary tumor," said Lyden.

"This is the first time anyone has discovered what we call the pre-metastatic niche."

Without the landing pad, the cancerous cell could not colonize the organ.

In animal and laboratory studies, the scientists looked at how breast, lung and oesophageal cancer spread. The envoys from the tumor determine the site of the secondary site.

Lyden said measuring the number of special bone marrow cells circulating in the body could help to determine whether a cancer is likely to spread.

"This opens up the door to new concepts of how metastasis is taking place. If we can understand all these multiple processes we can develop new drugs that block each step. That way we have a much better future than just trying to treat the tumor cell, which is almost like a last step in this process," he added.

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