Stan Higgins reports: An American has received a blackmail email demanding payment in bitcoin after user data from the extramarital affair platform Ashley Madison was leaked. The email, provided to CoinDesk and dated 20th August, was sent by an entity calling itself “Team GrayFlay” and contained the individual’s name and personal address. The user was instructed to…
Month: August 2015
Toronto-area lawyers file class action over Ashley Madison breach
Jenny Yuen of Toronto Sun reports on a potential class action lawsuit filed in Toronto. The plaintiff in the lawsuit is Eliot Shore, a disabled widower in Ottawa, who after 30 years of marriage lost his wife to breast cancer. He joined Ashley Madison for a short time seeking companionship, but never met anyone online….
U. Rhode Island says data breach involves some 3,000 email accounts
John Hill reports: The University of Rhode Island has asked law enforcement officials for help in investigating who hacked into the university’s email accounts records, possibly obtaining the email addresses and passwords to about 3,000 university email accounts, a university spokeswoman said Thursday. Read more on Providence Journal. Related: URI FAQ on incident
How is this type of breach still happening in the Veterans Administration system?
I thought the Veterans Administration system had taken steps to ensure that people could not forward/send emails with protected health information outside the system. Yet an incident in Texas that was included in the VA’s July report to Congress shows that this still occurs. The VA’s summary of the incident for July 23rd notes: As…
Chaffetz wants answers from US-CERT, OPM on hack
Adam Mazmanian reports that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is asking some very specific questions of OPM and US-CERT: Chaffetz wants US-CERT, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, to report on when it was first contacted by OPM to report the breach, and any reporting or analysis on the nature of…
Second Ashley Madison data dump, bigger than the first, lays bare their source code
As if it couldn’t get any worse for Avid Life Media, a second data dump has been released on the dark web. This one appears to contain all of CEO Noel Biderman’s emails and the source code for their web sites. As Trusted Sec notes on their blog: if this turns out to be legitimate…