SwissInfo.ch reports: Last Wednesday Comparis.ch, which has 80 million visits a year, was shut down by ransomware attackers demanding $400,000 (CHF370,000) in cryptocurrencies to put it back online. By Friday the website was operational again. A Comparis spokesman told SWI swissinfo.ch that no ransom had been paid. The company initially said it believed that no customer…
Author: Dissent
UK: Nottingham nurse accessed confidential records of online dating matches
Ben Cooper reports: A nurse who accessed confidential medical records including those of people she met online dating has been allowed to continue working by a disciplinary panel. Helen Kirkpatrick, a former paediatric nurse in Nottingham, accessed 28 different patient medical records without clinical reasons for doing so over a period of 16 months between…
An insurtech startup exposed thousands of sensitive insurance applications
Zack Whittaker reports: A security lapse at insurance technology startup BackNine exposed hundreds of thousands of insurance applications after one of its cloud servers was left unprotected on the internet. BackNine might be a company you’re not familiar with, but it might have processed your personal information if you applied for insurance in the past…
TX: Thousands of employees and dependents of Whitehouse ISD just had their data dumped on the dark web
School districts continue to be low-hanging fruit for threat actors. While Grief threat actors hacked and then dumped data from Clover Park School District in Washington, Booneville School District in Mississippi, and Lancaster ISD in Texas, Vice Society hacked and then dumped data from Whitehouse ISD, also in Texas. On June 28, DataBreaches.net emailed Whitehouse…
Dutch ethical hackers on a mission to fix the internet
AFP has a nice piece on Victor Gevers and the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure. No, DIVD are not new kids on the block. They have been around for years, quietly and responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities, which is why some of us were appalled — and furious — when Victor was falsely accused of lying about…
Microsoft, Google, Citizen Lab blow lid off zero-day bug-exploiting spyware sold to governments
Iain Thomson reports: Software patches from Microsoft this week closed two vulnerabilities exploited by spyware said to have been sold to governments by Israeli developer Candiru. On Thursday, Citizen Lab released a report fingering Candiru as the maker of the espionage toolkit, an outfit Microsoft code-named Sourgum. It is understood the spyware, code-named DevilsTongue by Microsoft, exploited…