On August 2, a researcher contacted DataBreaches.net about a misconfigured Amazon s3 storage bucket they had discovered. The bucket contained more than 10,000 files, recently updated, with protected health information of patients seen by or involved with BioTel Heart cardiac data network. Sometimes it is easy to figure out the likely owner of an Amazon…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Check Point researchers uncovered Alexa flaw that exposed personal information and speech histories
Sharon Ross reports: Researchers at Check Point say they identified an exploit in Amazon’s Alexa voice platform that could have given attackers access to users’ personal information, speech histories, and Amazon accounts. In a blog post, they describe the way in which an attack might have been carried out against a user, beginning with a…
Federal Appeals Court Dismisses CareFirst Data Breach Appeal
From EPIC.org: The D.C. Circuit has ruled that it lacks jurisdiction to hear the appeal of CareFirst customers whose data was stolen in a 2014 data breach. The lower court in Attias v. CareFirst dismissed most of the plaintiffs and claims in the case for failure to allege damages and certified the dismissed claims for appeal. The D.C. Circuit…
Revealed: 1,400 data breaches at HSE included patient photos and medical files
Ken Foxe reports: The HSE has suffered almost 1,400 separate data breaches over the past two years involving photographing of patients, infection status being disclosed to other family members, and the discovery of confidential medical files in public places. The number of breaches showed a sharp rise between 2018, when 556 incidents were recorded, and…
Ad Industry Opposes FTC’s Proposed Security Regulations For Financial Institutions
Wendy Davis reports: The Federal Trade Commission’s proposed changes to security regulations for financial institutions could also affect a broad swath of non-financial companies — including ad agencies, social networks, lead generators and ad-tech companies — according to the Association of National Advertisers. The organization is urging the FTC to refrain from imposing a slate…
National cyber agency scans the web, detects scores of exposed Israeli databases
Omer Kabir reports: A scanning and detecting system developed by the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) has discovered 145 at risk databases 16 of them containing extremely sensitive private and business information, according to details provided to Calcalist by the government agency. Following the detection, the INCD reached out to the organizations that own and…