Officials with the City of Portland have teamed up with their insurance carrier to file suit against Volunteer State Bank, which they say last year allowed unauthorized wire transfers that drained the city's accounts by more than $100,000. In their complaint, the plaintiffs say a city official's computer appeared to have been highjacked by a virus last December and told to drain $175,000 from the city's water and sewer account at Volunteer State through three transfers.

One of the transfers went to an Ohio jeweler store, which promptly returned the money. But the two others went to accounts in New Jersey and California, whose unidentified owners quickly withdrew the cash. Portland and the Tennessee Municipal League Risk Management Pool say Volunteer State needs to pay them back the lost $115,000 plus interest from those two charges because "the security procedure employed by the Bank was not a commercially reasonable method of providing security against unauthorized payment orders and the Bank did not accept the fraudulent payment orders in good faith."

The attention being paid to Mitt Romney's tax records could reach a fever pitch in the next month if claims by an anonymous hacker/group's claims of infiltrating the Cool Springs office of CPA giant PricewaterhouseCoopers turn out to be true. The hacker says it entered the firm's Corporate Centre offices on the night of Aug. 25 and set about downloading many Romney files.

"Once on the 3rd floor, the team moved down the stairs to the 2nd floor and setup shop in an empty office room. During the night, suite 260 was entered, and all available 1040 tax forms for Romney were copied. A package was sent to the PWC on suite 260 with a flash drive containing a copy of the 1040 files, plus copies were sent to the Democratic office in the county and copies were sent to the GOP office in the county at the beginning of the week also containing flash drives with copies of Romney's tax returns before 2010."

Our man Ken Whitehouse has more details — including a $1 million Bitcoin payoff plan and a Sept. 28 data release date — from the case.

Cybera Inc. has signed an agreement with Shell Oil Products US and Motiva Enterprises to offer its Cybera ONE Security Services Platform to Shell-branded wholesalers nationwide. The parties say the move will help the wholesalers reduce pump fraud, which some oil companies have estimated cost the average store $1,600 per year.

“Making solutions like this available to our Shell-branded wholesalers at a competitive cost reinforces our commitment to deliver technology leadership,” said Walt Gothard, Shell technology manager North America. “Strategically, this deal provides a platform for future technology developments to come while tactically helping our branded wholesalers minimize their exposure to offline conditions.”

Nissan officials say they are still trying to get to the bottom of an attempted technological break-in late last month. Nothing was taken from the auto maker's network, but a company exec says his team is prepared.

We're betting the IT crew at Corrections Corp. of America is putting in some extra hours today after hackers affiliated with the Anonymous movement hijacked the website of their competitor GEO Group. Anonymous has said it wants to go after other parts of the prison management industry.