Brandi Vincent reports: A Democratic lawmaker wants answers and actions taken to address unsecured servers at three military medical facilities that he said are putting service members’ personal information at risk. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., penned a letter to the Defense Health Agency Thursday pressing it to eliminate the exposure of sensitive medical data belonging to military…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Iran vs U.S., The Cyber Front Explained
On January 3, the U.S. announced the successful assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s top general. Dire warnings about retaliation immediately appeared in the news, and it wasn’t long before we began to see headlines claiming that Iran had launched cyberattacks on the U.S. But were these really state actors or sophisticated actors, or or were…
FTC Summarizes 2019 Changes to Data Security Orders
Caleb Skeath and Danielle Kehl of Covington & Burling write: In a recent blog post, the Federal Trade Commission highlighted three key changes it made in 2019 in its approach to issuing orders in data security enforcement matters. As stated by Andrew Smith, the Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in the blog post, the…
Washington State Attorney General’s Office 2019 Data Breach Report
For those who may not know, Washington State produces its own data breach report annually. Here’s a snippet from their report: In 2019, the total number of breaches reported to our office increased by nearly 20%, with just over 70% resulting from a malicious cyberattack. Yep, the percentage increase in number of incidents/reports sounds about…
New and improved FTC data security orders: Better guidance for companies, better protection for consumers
I held off on posting this one as so many people need a bit more time to get back into the swing of things after the holidays. Andrew Smith, Director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection, posted this on January 6 on the FTC’s site: When Chairman Simons and I arrived at the FTC,…
MAZE Relaunches “Name and Shame” Website, Continues Dumping Data from Reluctant Victims
Sarah Coble reports: A threat group has once again taken to the internet to publish data stolen from alleged victims who refuse to cooperate with its ransom demands. In December 2019, the MAZE ransomware group published online a portion of the 120 GB of data they claimed to have stolen from Southwire, North America’s most prominent wire…