The The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2018 Internet Crime Report has been released. The report includes information from 351,936 complaints of suspected Internet crime, with reported losses in excess of $2.7 billion. Here’s a spoiler alert, as I haven’t had time to read the entire report yet. From their summary: This past year,…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Did ransomware claim a victim or did two doctors just make a poor decision?
An article by William Maruca of FoxRothschild is headlined, “Ransomware Claims A Victim.” It discusses the case of Brookside ENT, whose doctors decided to shutter their practice and retire a year early after a ransomware attack that encrypted their patient data, billing information, scheduling information, and even their backups. In other words, the attacker successfully…
India: Rising Cybercrime Frontier
For the past year or more, I’ve been receiving numerous tips and notifications from trusted researchers about leaks and breaches involving entities in India. While some of the incidents involve alleged miscreants, other incidents involve human error or misconfiguration situations. But as many of us have experienced and reported, when it comes to data protection…
SEC Issues Privacy and Data Security Risk Alert
Joseph Lazzarotti of JacksonLewis writes: Following recent examinations of SEC-registered investment advisers and broker-dealers, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) published a privacy risk alert on April 16, 2019. OCIE is hoping to remind advisers and broker-dealers about providing compliant privacy and opt-out notices, and adopting and implementing effective policies and…
Spear Phishing Campaign Targets Ukraine Government and Military; Infrastructure Reveals Potential Link to So-Called Luhansk People’s Republic
John Hultquist, Ben Read, Oleg Bondarenko, and Chi-en Shen of FireEye explain: In early 2019, FireEye Threat Intelligence identified a spear phishing email targeting government entities in Ukraine. The spear phishing email included a malicious LNK file with PowerShell script to download the second-stage payload from the command and control (C&C) server. The email was…
Don’t Acquire a Company Until You Evaluate Its Data Security
The new issue of Harvard Business Review has an article by Chirantan Chatterjee and D. Daniel Sokol. It begins: When Marriott International acquired Starwood in 2016 for $13.6 billion, neither company was aware of a cyber-attack on Starwood’s reservation system that dated back to 2014. The breach, which exposed the sensitive personal data of nearly 500…