Carl Herberger of Radware writes: If someone locked down your pacemaker, what would you pay to regain control? If hackers took over a cockpit or locomotive, what would you pay for restitution? This is the future of ransomware that we’ll almost certainly see if the evolution of these threats holds course. Any time human safety…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
US govt bank insurer ‘covered up China hack to protect top boss’
Shaun Nichols reports: The US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – a government agency tasked with safeguarding citizens’ bank accounts – deliberately covered up a cyberattack by China to protect its incoming chairman. This is according to a damning report from Republican members of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who slammed the bank…
Healthcare Sector Under Attack? Yes.
From a new report by InfoArmor: InfoArmor has identified a group of bad actors performing targeted cyberattacks on healthcare institutions and their IT infrastructure, including connected medical devices such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging systems (MRI), X-ray machines and mobile computing healthcare workstations. This group of bad actors has performed at least four successful attacks against…
IoT Medical Devices: A Prescription for Disaster
Tom Spring reports: Late last month, TrapX Labs’ security team spotted an uptick in the prevalence of a new more virulent strain of malware targeting hospitals and their IoT equipment. Researchers discovered attackers targeting unpatched medical equipment running Windows XP and Windows 7 with variations of attacks such as the Conficker worm, long thought obsolete. The…
Caldicott’s health security reform fails to address basic cyber hygiene
Richard Olver writes: The NHS treats more than 1 million people every 36 hours. These patients are often at their most vulnerable physically and emotionally, but so too are their digital selves. The health sector accounts for the most data security incidents in the UK — more than 40% of all UK incidents in Q4 2015 — and…
Analysis of Health Care Data Breach Litigation Trends
The law firm of Bryan Cave lists nine factors entities should look at when considering the risk that litigation poses following a breach. They note: Specifically, unless a plaintiff has been the victim of identity theft or has suffered some other type of concrete injury, most courts have refused to let them proceed based solely on the…