Jerry DeMarco reports: Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey agreed to pay $1.1 million and improve data-security practices to settle charges that it failed to properly protect the privacy of nearly 690,000 state policyholders whose personal information was contained on two laptops stolen from the insurer’s Newark headquarters. The insurance giant — New…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
State Data Breach Notification Laws: February 2017 Privacy Update
Cynthia J. Larose and Michael B. Katz of Mintz Levin write: During 2016, amendments to breach notification laws in five states went into effect (California, Nebraska, Oregon, Rhode Island and Tennessee). And by the end of last year, well over twenty states had introduced or were considering new regulations or amendments to their existing security breach…
CYBERSECURITY: Actions Needed to Strengthen U.S. Capabilities
From a GAO report 17-440T released today: What GAO Found GAO has consistently identified shortcomings in the federal government’s approach to ensuring the security of federal information systems and cyber critical infrastructure as well as its approach to protecting the privacy of personally identifiable information (PII). While previous administrations and agencies have acted to improve…
Open Databases a Juicy Extortion Target (and a Sitting Duck for Malicious Destruction)
I’ve reported on this concern before, but Tom Spring has a nice write-up on ThreatPost that begins: Recent attacks against insecure MongoDB, Hadoop and CouchDB installations represent a new phase in online extortion, born from ransomware’s roots with the promise of becoming a nemesis for years to come. “These types of attacks have grown from…
Third-party incidents continue to put patient ePHI at risk: Protenus
Protenus, Inc. has released its Breach Barometer for January. As they report, 2017 is starting out where 2016 left off: we are seeing an average of one breach per day involving health data. Protenus’s report, based on 31 incidents, reported that there were 388,307 breached records for the 26 incidents for which they had numbers. The single largest…
FBI Search Warrant That Fueled Massive Government Hacking Was Unconstitutional, EFF Tells Court
Boston—An FBI search warrant used to hack into thousands of computers around the world was unconstitutional, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal appeals court today in a case about a controversial criminal investigation that resulted in the largest known government hacking campaign in domestic law enforcement history. The Constitution requires law enforcement officers seeking a search warrant…