Brian Krebs reports: In a great many ransomware attacks, the criminals who pillage the victim’s network are not the same crooks who gained the initial access to the victim organization. More commonly, the infected PC or stolen VPN credentials the gang used to break in were purchased from a cybercriminal middleman known as an initial…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
A Missouri Reporter Is (Still) Getting Blamed For the Security Flaw He Exposed
Jack Gillum sought — and obtained — some records from Missouri Governor Parson’s office concerning the governor’s staff’s public statements and the governor’s intention to try to prosecute journalist Josh Renaud. Renaud’s crime: he discovered a vulnerability on a state website where by clicking the F12 key to view the source of a page, one…
The Impact of Data Security Incident Trends on Commercial Transactions: Part III – Vendor Agreement Resolutions for 2022
Craig Carpenter and Erika Vela of BakerHostetler write: As the BakerHostetler Digital Risk Advisory and Cybersecurity team wraps up the 2022 edition of annual Data Security Incident Response (DSIR) Report, we take one last look at the findings in the 2021 edition of the report to prepare our New Year’s resolutions of a data privacy and security attorney for…
FTC Finalizes Order with Mortgage Analytics Firm, Requiring it to Strengthen Security Safeguards, Increase Oversight of Vendors
In December, 2020, the FTC announced a proposed settlement with Texas-based Ascension Data & Analytics after a security breach involving one of its vendors resulted in the exposure of, and unauthorized access to, consumers’ mortgage applications. One year later, the settlement received final approval, as the FTC announced on December 22: The Federal Trade Commission…
Administrative fine imposed on psychotherapy centre Vastaamo for data protection violations
A hack and extortion attempt involving the psychotherapy center in Vastaamo, Finland was — and remains — one of the worst breaches ever covered on PogoWasRight.org and DataBreaches.net because it involved the sensitive mental health information of tens of thousands of patients and a coverup by an executive of the clinic. Now EDPB has posted…
FTC warns companies to remediate Log4j security vulnerability
Log4j is a ubiquitous piece of software used to record activities in a wide range of systems found in consumer-facing products and services. Recently, a serious vulnerability in the popular Java logging package, Log4j (CVE-2021-44228) was disclosed, posing a severe risk to millions of consumer products to enterprise software and web applications. This vulnerability is…