Check Point writes: At the end of October 2020, we reported that hospitals and healthcare organizations had been targeted by a rising wave of ransomware attacks, with the majority of attacks using the infamous Ryuk ransomware. This followed a Joint Cybersecurity Advisory issued by the CISA, FBI and HHS, which warned of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to US hospitals…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Apex Laboratory confirms ransomware attack; only recently discovered data theft
DataBreaches.net recently reported that Apex Laboratory Inc. had apparently been attacked by DoppelPaymer ransomware threat actors. Apex was added to their leak site on December 15. As proof of claims, the threat actors uploaded approximately 10,000 files containing protected health information of patients (PHI) and personally identifiable information of employees (PII). The 10,000 estimate is…
Bittrex To Delist Privacy Coins Monero, ZCash and Dash in Two Weeks
Decrypt.co reports: Crypto exchange Bittrex today announced that it will delist privacy coins Monero (XMR), ZCash and Dash on Friday, January 15, at 23:00 UTC. The Bermuda-registered exchange did not provide a reason for the delistings, but all three are privacy coins—a class of cryptocurrencies that offer untraceable transactions. Monero is private by default, and…
ROMWE’s press release reflects an abundance of …. something, but not caution.
This week, I drafted a commentary mocking ROMWE’s for claiming that they were notifying their consumers about a breach out of “an abundance of caution.” Then I decided to try to be nice, and I trashed it. Yesterday, Marco de Felice wrote a piece about the breach that shows that it was even worse than…
As 2020 draws to a close, it still takes too long to detect and notify patients of most breaches
The press release below the separator includes the kind of timeline that we often see in breach disclosures where an employee’s email account has been hacked. It continues to take many entities too long, in this blogger’s opinion, to detect breaches of their systems, then determine that PHI was involved, and then notify. In this…
Data Breach Litigation Without a Data Breach? Not So Fast Walmart Says…
Lydia de la Torre and Raisa Dyadkina of Squire Patton Boggs write: The Lavarious Gardiner v. Walmart Inc. et al. case is anything but typical. As a re-cap, back in July 2020, plaintiff filed a class action complaint against Walmart alleging that Walmart suffered a data breach which they never disclosed. As evidence of the breach,…