Kendal Enz reports: Sea Mar Community Health Centers is facing numerous class action complaints for alleged inadequate cyber security procedures that resulted in a data breach of more than 650,000 class members’ sensitive information. The complaints, which were filed in November 2021 in King County Superior Court, were removed to Washington’s Western District Court this…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Only 3% of consumers freeze credit after data breach
Here’s a statistic I haven’t seen before. Rachel DePompa reports: According to a new study by the Identity Theft Resource Center, Americans know about credit freezes but rarely use them. The research was published by the nonprofit DIG.Works. It found only 3% of surveyed consumers actually froze their credit after receiving a data breach notice….
2021 Saw Sharp Increase in Ransomware Data Leaks and Ransom Demands
HIPAA Journal has a piece highlighting some findings from Crowdstrike’s 2021 report. It begins: CrowdStrike has released its annual threat report which shows there was a major increase in data leaks following ransomware attacks in 2021, rising 82% from 2020. CrowdStrike observed 2,686 ransomware attacks in 2021 compared to 1,474 in 2020. There were more…
This site’s new “No help for you” policy
From the “Yes-I’m-grumpy-but-you-earned-it Department:” Over the years, mainstream journalists have reached out to me for information related to breach stories they were developing, and I generally tried to help them. In some cases, that might involve a few phone calls. In other cases, it might be an hour or more of my time on the…
Elephant Beetle: Stealthy Hacker Group Stole Millions Undetected
Damir Mujezinovic reports: Israeli cybersecurity firm Sygnia released a report in January 2022 revealing that a hacker group dubbed Elephant Beetle siphoned off millions from businesses in the financial sector in Latin America. […] To carry out its Java-based attacks, Elephant Beetle uses a wide arsenal of more than 80 unique tools and scripts, the researchers wrote…
Iranian hackers behind biggest ransomware attacks of 2021: Report
Shouvik Das reports: Iranian hackers used ransomware tools the most in 2021 to steal data and blackmail users and companies, while hackers from China were the biggest exploiters of software vulnerabilities around the world in the same period, reveals a new report from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. Iran-based hacker groups, according to the report released on…