The bust of an international credit-card fraud ring makes the world a marginally safer place to do business -- but also reveals the scope of the challenges you face in trying to keep your data safe.

NYT: "The indictments last week of 11 people involved in the group give a remarkably comprehensive picture of how the Internet is enabling new kinds of financial crimes on a vast international scale."

A flat world works for criminals, too.

[I]nvestigators detailed how they had tracked Mr. Gonzalez and other members of a ring that extended from Ukraine, where a key figure bought and sold stolen numbers over the Internet, to Estonia, where a hacker infiltrated the servers of a Dallas-based restaurant chain.

The criminals stored much of their data on computer servers in Latvia and Ukraine, and purchased blank debit and credit cards from confederates in China, which they imprinted with some of the stolen numbers for use in cash machines, investigators say.

It's a great story -- I'm guessing a book deal is in the works already, to be followed by a disappointing movie, because computer crime tends to be boring on the screen.

But the great story should make you nervous.