Gary Stevens writes: Research that’s done on malicious breaches of data presents a unique conundrum for the security professionals who are doing the investigating: should access to sets of breached raw data become available to public users and, if so, how? In light of the pandemic, the acceleration toward location-distributed work has the potential to…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
In major ruling, 2nd Circuit says no circuit split on data breaches and standing
Alison Frankel reports: For years, I’ve been writing about a split among the federal circuits on whether data breach victims can establish a right to sue in federal court merely by showing that they are at increased risk of identity theft. Just a couple of months ago, when the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held in…
Forget Ransomware, Microsoft Says Cryptojacking Is Our Biggest Threat
Simon Batt reports: For a while, ransomware attacks were a hacker’s and scammer’s favorite tool for extracting money from their victims. Now, Microsoft reports that ransomware has now fallen out of favor in place of another kind of attack: cryptojacking. Why Cryptojacking Took the Number One Spot On the Microsoft Security blog, the company details how the…
Mean and median ransomware payments up in Q1, but number of victims paying ransom may be decreasing
A new report from Coveware indicates that the average ransom payment increased 43% to $220,298 in Q1 of this year from $154,108 in Q4 of 2020. The median payment in Q1 also increased to $78,398 from $49,450, a 58% increase. That’s the bad news. At the same time average payment was increasing, Coveware notes that…
It: Union of Comuni Colli del Monferrato, cyber attack: hackers publish data
Marco A. De Felice reports: The Avaddon ransomware group publishes screenshots of some data stolen during the cyber attack on the Unione di Comuni Colli del Monferrato, but by mistake it puts the wrong Unione (Unione dei Colli DiVini in the heart of Monferrato) under DDoS attack. Oops? But as Marco notes, that wasn’t the…
Al: Election Data Breach Story Renews Press Freedom Debate in Albania
Mimoza Picari and Keida Kostreci report: First came the news that the personal data of over 900,000 Albanians might be in the hands of party officials. Then came the news that the journalists who broke the story had been ordered by an anti-corruption court to hand over devices, including computers and cellphones. As Albania heads to…