In June, many of us first became aware that Facebook was receiving sensitive medical information from hospital websites. Of 33 hospital websites that The Markup tested, 10 of them had trackers (“Meta Pixels”) which sent information to Facebook when a patients clicked a button on the hospital’s site to schedule an a medical appointment. This…
Author: Dissent
WA: Columbia River Mental Health Services issues preliminary media notice of a breach
On August 8, Columbia River Mental Health Services (“CRMHS”) in Washington State notified HHS about a data security breach involving some employee email accounts. A press release about the incident claims that CRMHS recently became aware of suspicious activity related to email accounts. They do not state exactly what they mean by “recently.” An investigation…
Patchwork of US State Regulations Becomes More Complex as Florida, North Carolina Ban Ransomware Payments
Scott Ikeda reports: The issue of banning ransomware payments has been contentious and hotly debated in governments throughout the world in the last few years, particularly as the problem seemed to grow out of control during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the US, the federal government has come down on the side of allowing payments but adding increasingly…
CO: Fremont County cyberattack update
Aidan Hulting reported the following on August 19: Fremont County officials say the county is still suffering from a cyberattack that took down county government systems on Wednesday, August 17th. The attack caused Fremont County Government buildings and county government systems to remain closed through Friday. Read more at KOAA. The official county website still…
Id: Communication Ministry studying report of IndiHome data leak
Antara News reports: The Communication and Informatics Ministry is still studying a report of the alleged leak of IndiHome subscribers ‘ personal data. The ministry will soon summon the management of state-owned telecommunication operator PT Telkom Indonesia as the holding company to clarify the incident, the ministry’s director general of informatics application, Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan,…
Hackers are using cookies to sidestep two-factor authentication
Fionna Agomuah reports: “Cookie stealing” is among the latest trends in cybercrimes that hackers are using to bypass credentials and access private databases, according to Sophos. Typical security advice for organizations has been to move their most sensitive information to cloud services or to use multifactor authentication (MFA) as a safety means. However, bad actors…