Jurgita Lapienytė reports: Lakewood is a city in Pierce County, Washington, with a population of over 63,000. BlackCat claimed it had breached Lakewood City Council and stolen over 250GB worth of data. “Because of their misunderstanding and inability to negotiate, we share information with you,” BlackCat said and shared a link to download 252GB of…
Author: Dissent
Ways and means committee demands investigation into 2021 taxpayer info leak
Katie Kerekes reports: Nineteen months after the confidential tax filings of American citizens were leaked, the House Committee on Ways and Means is seeking answers. In a letter to the Inspector General for Tax Administration, committee chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) relays his “expectations” regarding the “egregious and unprecedented” leak of this tax information, a duty which he affirms the…
Singapore data centre says no data loss discovered after report on hackers obtaining logins
CNA reports: Data centre operator ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) has noticed no data loss or impact to its customer service portals following a hacking incident in 2021, it said on Tuesday (Feb 21). Through unspecified means, the hackers made away with login credentials – email addresses and passwords – for customer-support websites for STT…
HardBit 2.0 Ransomware
Jason Hill reports: First observed in October 2022, HardBit is a ransomware threat that targets organizations to extort cryptocurrency payments for the decryption of their data. Seemingly improving upon their initial release, HardBit version 2.0 was introduced toward the end of November 2022, with samples seen throughout the end of 2022 and into 2023. Like…
Protenus releases its 2023 Breach Barometer for Health Data Breaches
Protenus LLC has released its seventh annual Breach Barometer report. Unlike other analyses that seem to rely solely on reports to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Breach Barometer uses a broader lens and includes reports from non-HIPAA entities that involved medical data or health insurance information on employees or patients. There…
MN: KFI Engineers pays $300k ransom, Black Basta ransomware group thanks…
Marco A. De Felice (@amvinfe) managed to shoulder-surf ransom negotiations between Black Basta and KFI Engineers (“KFI”) in Minnesota. He reports that the victims wound up paying $300,000.00, half of what the attackers initially demanded. KFI counts schools and hospitals among its clients, but as an engineering firm, one would not expect them to have…