William Alden reports: Palantir Technologies has cultivated a reputation as perhaps the most formidable data analysis firm in Silicon Valley, doing secretive work for defense and intelligence agencies as well as Wall Street giants. But when Palantir hired professional hackers to test the security of its own information systems late last year, the hackers found…
Month: June 2016
Military families victimized by a McDonald’s employee taking orders
Margaret Kavanagh reports: Purchasing some fast food turned into a big problem for some people in Norfolk. Right now a former McDonald’s employee is facing 5 felony charges, accused of skimming credit cards from customers. Police said the vast majority of victims are either in the military or related to someone in the military because…
International identity-theft ring victimized hundreds, including Hollywood actress, authorities say
Rachel Weiner reports: Federal agents said they have uncovered a massive international identity-theft scheme that victimized at least hundreds and maybe thousands of people, including an actress who appeared in the television shows “Smallville” and “Supergirl.” On Thursday, federal authorities arrested two people in Virginia and two in Georgia who allegedly were part of a…
Screwing up the basics of incident response, Friday edition
For today’s object lesson (and maybe abject lesson), I give you FIS Global and Guaranty Bank and Trust. I’ve written up the incident in more detail over on the Daily Dot, but the short version is a hacker (@1×0123) found a vulnerability in FIS Global’s client portal login and tweeted about it. FIS didn’t respond to him directly. Instead, they…
MN: Virus hits city server; resident data not likely breached
Lori Carlson reports: Staff and administrators at Prior Lake City Hall spent nearly four days battling a computer virus that struck the city’s HVAC system on the evening of Wednesday, June 8. City Manager Frank Boyles said a subsequent internal investigation showed no evidence of a data breach of personal information, such as the city’s…
Cryptocurrency-Backed Venture Capital Fund Hacked; Ether Plunges
Olga Kharif reports: Hackers moved some digital money from the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a cryptocurrency-backed venture capital fund, sending the price of ether — the virtual currency underlying the project — plunging. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, which supports ether, asked exchanges in a Reddit post to “please pause ETH and DAO trading, deposits and withdrawals until further notice,”…