According to a new study released today by EdTech Strategies, Tracking: EDU – Education Agency Website Security and Privacy Practices, state and local education agency websites were found to lack important security and privacy protections for students, families, and educators. “State department of education and school district websites have become indispensable for accessing information about…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Study: Alarming Number of Fortune 500 Credentials Found in Data Leaks
Ben Layer reports: Data breaches are common in the news lately, but a recent study by credential monitoring firm VeriClouds focuses specifically on the credentials of Fortune 500 employees found in account leaks posted online. Using a corpus of 8 billion stolen credentials gathered over three years, the total number of employees of each Fortune…
HHS OCR January 2018 OCR Cybersecurity Newsletter: Cyber Extortion
January 30, 2018 Incidents of cyber extortion have risen steadily over the past couple of years and, by many estimates, will continue to be a major source of disruption for many organizations. Cyber extortion can take many forms, but it typically involves cybercriminals’ demanding money to stop (or in some cases, to merely delay) their…
Hacking and phishing accounted for 75% of breaches reported to North Carolina in 2017
North Carolina issued a Security Breach Report for 2017. From the Executive Summary: This report provides a summary and discussion of the 1,022 data breaches reported to the North Carolina Department of Justice (NCDOJ) between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2017. Under North Carolina law, businesses and state and local governments are required to…
Senate IT Tells Staffers They’re On Their Own When It Comes To Personal Devices And State-Sponsored Hackers
Tim Cushing reports: Notification of state-sponsored hacking attempts has revealed another weak spot in the US government’s defenses. The security of the government’s systems is an ongoing concern, but the Senate has revealed it’s not doing much to ensure sensitive documents and communications don’t end up in the hands of foreign hackers. Read more on…
IRIN: Audit exposes UN food agency’s poor data-handling
Vulnerable people in the world’s troublespots could be at risk because of sloppy handling of sensitive data by a UN agency, according to an internal audit. In response, the World Food Programme told IRIN it was “working to get ahead of the curve” on data-handling, would address weaknesses, and spend more on systems. Read Ben…