The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has issued an alert describing a growing number of scams targeting businesses working with foreign suppliers or businesses that regularly perform wire transfer payments. These sophisticated scams are classified as business email compromise (BEC) or email account compromise (EAC) and use social engineering techniques to defraud businesses. Users and…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
TheDarkOverlord dumps 180,000 patients’ records from 3 hacks
While thousands of their followers on Twitter seem to be eagerly waiting for TheDarkOverlord (TDO) to dump more tv films or episodes of popular series, TDO went non-fiction this morning, dumping patient/medical records from some of their hacks in the healthcare sector last year. All told, almost 180,000 patients had their personal information shared with the world. Two of…
UK: Fertility patient data breach fine would have been much higher under GDPR
John Bryan uses a recent monetary penalty by the Information Commissioner’s Office to contrast what might happen to fines under the GDPR. Fertility patients being treated at the Lister Hospital, part of the US-based HCA Healthcare group, discovered in April 2015 that transcripts of their confidential patient-doctor conversations were publicly available on the world wide web….
China arrests over 4,200 for personal information fraud in 2016
Xinhua reports: Chinese police caught over 4,200 suspects for theft of personal information in 2016, with over 1,800 cases solved, according to the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). The police also managed to track more than 30 billion stolen personal information items last year, while nearly 100 of the suspects were hackers. Read more on…
What a decade of data breach investigations can teach us
George Nott has a good summary of some of the key findings in Verizon’s newest Data Breach Investigations Report. Some snippets: This year’s report – described by Verizon as an “InfoSec coddiwomple that has now culminated in a decade of nefarious deeds and malicious mayhem” – includes analysis on 42,068 incidents and 1,935 breaches from…
Ars Technica Live: Why it’s important to defend hackers, even the not nice ones
Cyrus Farivar reports: On June 13, 2017, Mark Jaffe is set to appear before the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to argue on behalf of his client, journalist Matthew Keys. And at the most recent Ars Live event, Jaffe spoke to David Kravets and me about this case and broader issues…