Having spent years interviewing hackers who described themselves as hacktivists or as hacking for the lulz, talking to hackers who engage in criminal hacking as a source of income has been…. educating, to say the least. But it’s also been a reminder that too many businesses really have no clue what they’re doing – not only in…
Category: U.S.
OR: Portland financial firms warns 20,000 clients after laptop stolen from employee’s car
Matthew Kish reports: One of Oregon’s largest financial firms has warned clients of a possible data breach. Portland-based M Holdings Securities Inc., a subsidiary of M Financial Holdings Inc., has informed California’s attorney general of a stolen laptop with client information, including social security numbers. The theft occurred July 29 in Salem. […] O’Connor said the laptop…
Law Firms Are “One-Stop Shopping” for Hackers, as Hickey Law Firm Found Out
Randy Evans and Shari Klevens write: This year has shown that law firms are not immune from infiltration by international hackers. This spring, a Russian hacker targeted 48 top law firms, seeking to obtain confidential insider information regarding mergers and acquisitions that would be very valuable and could impact global markets. […] These are not…
It’s 10 pm somewhere. Do you know where your old databases are?
An old database that seems to have magically reappeared online more than a decade after it was removed reminds us of an often-overlooked risk. In January, DataBreaches.net reported that a behavior intervention therapist’s database was exposed online due to a misconfigured MongoDB installation. What struck me about the incident was that the therapist likely had no idea that a company she had…
CA: Anesthesiologist notifies patients after PHI wound up in a trash container
Anesthesiologist Pratap S. Kurra, M.D., is notifying some of his patients whose protected health information was found to have been discarded improperly on August 8. In a template of the notification letter uploaded to the California Attorney General’s web site, Dr. Kurra writes: On August 9, 2016, I was informed that papers related to my…
RI: University Gastroenterology notifies patients of ransomware attack
University Gastroenterology is notifying patients after what sounds like a ransomware attack. In a notice on their web site, they write that on July 11, 2016, they discovered that an unauthorized individual had gained access to an electronic file storage system from a practice they had acquired in 2014, Consultants in Gastroenterology, and encrypted several files….