Margi Murphy and Brian Platt report: Canadian authorities have arrested a man suspected of being behind a string of hacks involving as many as 165 customers of Snowflake Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. Following a request from the US, Alexander “Connor” Moucka was taken into custody on a provisional arrest warrant on…
In July 2021, Chelan Douglas Health District in Washington experienced a data breach. They disclosed the breach to the public in March 2022, surprisingly patting themselves on the back for completing their investigation in 6-7 months. A number of media reports indicate that the breach reportedly affected almost 109,000 patients, but the breach was reported…
Bill Toulas reports: The Dstat.cc DDoS review platform has been seized by law enforcement, and two suspects have been arrested after the service helped fuel distributed denial-of-service attacks for years. The seizure and arrests were conducted as part of “Operation PowerOFF,” an ongoing international law enforcement operation that targets DDoS-for-hire platforms, aka “booters” or “stressers,” to…
Following up on a settlement yesterday that was HHS’s first enforcement action under OCR’s Risk Analysis Initiative, HHS OCR today released a security risk assessment tool. Here is their statement about it: Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP) are…
On October 29, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the government’s appeal of Conor Brian Fitzpatrick’s sentence. At issue was whether District Court Judge Leonie M. Brinkema had abused her discretion in sentencing Fitzpatrick and whether her sentence was “substantively unreasonable.” Judges have discretion in sentencing and courts are often reluctant…
Christian Vasquez reports: The FBI is seeing progress in the fight against ransomware gangs after conducting more than 30 disruption operations this year in which officials targeted the infrastructure used by those groups, one of the bureau’s top cybersecurity officials said Wednesday. Cynthia Kaiser, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said during CyberScoop’s…