So to review…. in the past four months or so, I’ve seen.. a database with 191 million U.S. voter registration records leaking… a database with 55 million Philippine voters that was hacked and dumped… a database with 50 million Turkish citizens’ identity information that was leaked.. information on expats and tourists in Thailand leaking online… Almost…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Ca: Co-workers irate after Powell River nurse who snooped in medical files gets job back
If you think it’s “excessive” to fire an employee for snooping in patients’ records, then you don’t get the importance of medical privacy. And for a union representing healthcare workers to try to claim that an employee shouldn’t be fired for repeated snooping just because others hadn’t been fired is, well…. disgraceful. What has happened…
The security holes at the heart of the Panama Papers
James Temperton and Matt Burgess report: The front-end computer systems of Mossack Fonseca are outdated and riddled with security flaws, analysis has revealed. The law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers hack has shown an “astonishing” disregard for security, according to one expert. Amongst other lapses, Mossack Fonseca has failed to update its Outlook Web Access login…
Don’t let embarrassment about a data breach cost you even more
There’s an interesting commentary by Evan Schuman on Computerworld today. Nobody likes to be embarrassed. That goes for company executives. This fact of human nature helps explain why the breach-disclosure laws that have been adopted by many states can be leveraged by data thieves for even more profit than they could realize before. Evan notes…
FBI Says a Mysterious Hacking Group Has Had Access to US Govt Files for Years
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports: The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard. The alert, which is also available…
FBI: we don’t advise entities to pay ransom demands
While I was at the recent PHI Protection Network conference, I had an opportunity to speak with Ben Stone, Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s Pennsylvania Cyber Squad. One of the questions I put to him was why the FBI had been advising companies to pay ransomware demands. Special Agent Stone told me that that wasn’t…