Victoria Hudgins reports: While federal lawmakers might be hesitant to enact national data privacy legislation, some states are quickly moving to define reasonable cybersecurity—and protect those that adhere to them. But even as legislators extend “safe harbor” protections to encourage cybersecurity, lawyers noted some companies might ignore the incentive to avoid burdensome responsibilities. For companies that are already compliant…
Author: Dissent
Supreme Court holds that monetary relief is unavailable under Section 13(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act
Brian Wolfman notes: The first paragraph of the Court’s unanimous opinion in AMG Capital Management v. FTC sums it up: Section 13(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act authorizes the Commission to obtain, “in proper cases,” a “permanent injunction” in federal court against “any person, partnership, or corporation” that it believes “is violating, or is about to…
New Qlocker ransomware is hitting hundreds of QNAP NAS devices per day
Catalin Cimpanu reports: A new ransomware strain named Qlocker is on a rampage and infecting hundreds of QNAP network-attached storage (NAS) devices every day, taking over hard drives, moving users’ files inside password-protected 7zip archives, and asking for a $550 ransom payment. The first cases were reported on Tuesday, April 20, and the number of…
NC: Wake Forest University Counseling Center sends errant email to hundreds
Cooper Sullivan reports: On the morning of April 14, the University Counseling Center sent out a feedback survey to 860 email addresses — some students, faculty, staff and 68 accounts unaffiliated with the university — in which the recipient list was unencrypted and visible to all who had access to the email. About 10 minutes…
ToxicEye: Trojan abuses Telegram platform to steal your data
Charlie Osborne reports: Operators of a new Remote Access Trojan (RAT) are exploiting the Telegram service to maintain control of their malware. Dubbed ToxicEye, the RAT abuses Telegram as part of command-and-control (C2) infrastructure in order to conduct rampant data theft. On Thursday, Omer Hofman from Check Point Research said in a blog post that the new…
Illinois Attorney General’s Office hit by ransomware? State investigating.
Threat actors known as DoppelPaymer claim to have attacked the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. And on April 13, the AG’s office acknowledged that they were investigating a network compromise: April 13 — Attorney General Kwame Raoul today announced the Office of the Attorney General’s network has been compromised. Attorney General Raoul released the following statement:…