In a story that is getting all too common, Internet-based businesses are getting caught once again in the act of taking user data without permission.

The latest company to attain dishonorable mention is Path, the social networking and photo sharing site.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that hackers are scamming QuickBooks users right in the heart of tax season, Intuit’s cure may be worse than the original scam: This week Intuit issued an alert to QuickBooks users warning of a “fake e-mail,” but then sent users to a site that itself is infected with malware.

The news that the Chamber of Commerce was hacked into by Chinese apparatchiks should come as a shock to no one. It was only recently we posted a blog concerning the Chinese hacking into both AT&T and Verizon networks by implanting eavesdropping technology into network equipment purchased by American companies overseas.

Last week the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and Better Business Bureau (BBB) issued alerts warning of phishing attacks targeted at both banks and their depositors.

Phishing has been one of the banes of e-mail ever since the first e-mail delivery services emerged. Now more than a decade later it looks as though we finally may be witnessing the beginning of a broad-based effort to curtail, if not eliminate, the vast majority of phishing attacks.