For the past year, I’ve been criticizing entities that describe their data leaks as “hacks” (cf, this article of mine on The Daily Dot or this post as examples). More recently, Zack Whittaker has also forcefully raised that issue on ZDNet. Whether other journalists will adapt their language and correctly report incidents as “leaks” instead of “hacks”…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Cyber extortion – legality of ransom payments and the approach of businesses and insurers
Sami Paracha of Taylor Wessing has an article on cyber-extortion and ransom demands from a UK perspective. It makes for interesting reading. The article begins: Cyber Security is an omnipresent risk for most businesses. And it is a growing risk given the more frequent and serious cyber attacks, higher costs for proactively managing these risks…
2016: Healthcare data breaches in review, Part 2
This is the second part of a look-back at 2016 and a commentary on why we need to analyze breaches differently if we really want to become more proactive in preventing them. Part 1 of this article can be found here). To recap Part 1: although headlines tend to scream “HACK!” (and irritatingly show us stock images of…
2016: Healthcare data breaches in review, Part 1
There were a number of year-in-review analyses for the healthcare sector, but now Protenus has released its report, which is based on analyses of 450 U.S. incidents first disclosed in 2016. The incidents were compiled by DataBreaches.net, who also provided some of the analyses. While some media outlets still headline external hacks where massive numbers of records…
D-Link fights back against ‘baseless’ data security lawsuit
Corinne Reichert reports: Cause of Action Institute has announced that it will be defending D-Link against the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s “unwarranted and baseless” lawsuit claiming that the technology company put thousands of customers at risk of unauthorised access by failing to secure its IP cameras and routers. The FTC should not be…
This Crazy Ransomware Restores Your Files If You Read About Ransomware
Lee Mathews writes: We’ve seen some pretty dastardly ransomware pop up over the past couple of years. Popcorn Time decrypts your files for free if you pass the infection on to your friends. Jigsaw deletes some of your files every hour until you pay up. The Koolova ransomware put a whole new spin on things. Like Popcorn…