HHS has announced another big settlement and corrective action plan. This one stems from a hack of Premera Blue Cross (PBC) in 2014 that went undetected until March of 2015. DataBreaches.net had covered this incident at the time and the follow-ups that included a class action lawsuit that settled, a settlement with state attorneys general,…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
The High Cost of Reporting a Non-Reportable Data Breach
Mark Rasch raises an important issue — the risks of reporting a breach that you may not need to report. Using the Blackbaud incident as his starting point, he writes: In May, cloud provider Blackbaud was the victim of a ransomware attack designed to lock it out of accessing its own data and servers. The…
Interim Report on Blackbaud Breach: 5.6 million patients and counting…
Since our first interim report, DataBreaches.net has continued to compile reports that mention patient information that was disclosed to Blackbaud and that may have been accessed or exfiltrated by ransomware threat actors in the data breach discovered in May. Despite the criminals pinky-swearing that they wouldn’t misuse the data and would destroy it all in…
Big Game Hunting: Now in Russia
Rustam Mirkasymov and Oleg Skulkin of Group-IB write: The email raised no suspicions. An employee of a Russian medical company boldly clicked on the link and downloaded the attached ZIP archive. The message with the subject “Bill due” looked like it had been sent by the Finance Department of a large Russian media holding, the…
A bit more on Nathan Wyatt’s sentencing and what happens next
Because I had no idea how some things work when a convicted defendant is a foreign national who is supposed to pay restitution, and because I found some elements of Nathan Wyatt’s sentence confusing, I followed up with the U.S. Department of Justice on his sentence (see my previous post about his guilty plea and…
US cybersecurity agency issues super-rare emergency directive to patch Windows Server flaw ASAP
Robbie Harb reports: Uncle Sam’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has taken the unusual step of issuing an emergency directive that gives US government agencies a four-day deadline to roll out a Windows Server patch. The directive, issued on September 18, demanded that executive agencies to take “immediate and emergency action” to patch CVE-2020-1472, the CVSS-perfect-ten-rated…