Ian Smith reports that if you think you were impacted by the OPM data breach but haven’t received a notification letter, you can submit a verification request through a government web site: The Office of Personnel Management has completed mailing notification letters to roughly 93% of individuals whose Social Security Number and other personal information was…
Category: Hack
Ransom paid by police and law firms to hackers, says Calgary privacy expert
Danielle Nerman reports: The president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada says it’s not just individuals and small businesses who are shelling out to hackers who infect their computers with viruses. “Police departments and law firms are very, very attractive targets and they pay quite often,” said Sharon Polsky, a Calgary data protection and privacy expert. “If it’s…
Man who hacked St. Louis County police union gets 18 months
Oops. I think I missed this one the other day. Robert Patrick reports: A man who helped launch a cyberattack that disabled a St. Louis County police union website last year was sentenced to 18 months in prison Monday. Justin E. Payne, 33, disabled the St. Louis County Police Association website a year ago by overwhelming it…
Hacked WordPress to reset 30,000 passwords
Alasdair Gilchrist reports: Popular blogging website WordPress has forced its hosts WP Engine to announce that it has fallen victim to a security breach that has forced a reset of 30,000 customer passwords. WordPress is a very popular blogging platform and as a result has often been the target of attacks and compromises from threat actors and…
77,000 Steam accounts are hacked and raided every month
Graham Cluley writes: Valve, the developers of the Steam online gaming platform, says that its members are facing a serious problem. Accounts have always been hijacked on the gaming site, by hackers who have stolen passwords, but now the problem is said to have risen twenty-fold, with some 77,000 Steam accounts hacked every month. Read…
Hackers Threaten to Put Bullet in Researcher’s Brain
Robert Hackett reports: Researchers at the Citizen Lab, an Internet watchdog group based at the University of Toronto, published a deep dive on Monday about a seven-year hacking campaign against South American political dissidents, journalists, and others. During the investigation, the cyber spies engaged with the researchers directly, issuing a series of taunts, jabs, and threats on…