Apps that collect and store health-related information are often not covered by HIPAA, but a breach involving the data they collect could be problematic. Today, I report on two leaking apps containing health information. Both of these leaks were reported to DataBreaches.net by researcher Chris Vickery. Part 1, below, is on iFit’s data leak. Part 2 will report on…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Ransom paid by police and law firms to hackers, says Calgary privacy expert
Danielle Nerman reports: The president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada says it’s not just individuals and small businesses who are shelling out to hackers who infect their computers with viruses. “Police departments and law firms are very, very attractive targets and they pay quite often,” said Sharon Polsky, a Calgary data protection and privacy expert. “If it’s…
Employee error most likely cause of data breaches among in-house legal counsel, new report says
More than half of in-house legal counsel report that their companies are increasing spending on cybersecurity, while one-third state that their companies have experienced a data breach, according to a new report from the Washington, DC-based Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Foundation. Read more on CanadianUnderwriter.ca. The report will cost you $475 (yeah, right, I’ll…
77,000 Steam accounts are hacked and raided every month
Graham Cluley writes: Valve, the developers of the Steam online gaming platform, says that its members are facing a serious problem. Accounts have always been hijacked on the gaming site, by hackers who have stolen passwords, but now the problem is said to have risen twenty-fold, with some 77,000 Steam accounts hacked every month. Read…
High-Risk Security Vulnerabilities Identified During Reviews of Information System General Controls at Three California Managed-Care Organizations Raise Concerns About the Integrity of Systems Used To Process Medicaid Claims
From the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services: We summarized the high-risk security vulnerabilities that we identified as audit findings in our previous reviews of information system general controls at three California Medi Cal managed-care organizations (MCOs). We identified 74 high-risk security vulnerabilities in the information system…
Hackers Threaten to Put Bullet in Researcher’s Brain
Robert Hackett reports: Researchers at the Citizen Lab, an Internet watchdog group based at the University of Toronto, published a deep dive on Monday about a seven-year hacking campaign against South American political dissidents, journalists, and others. During the investigation, the cyber spies engaged with the researchers directly, issuing a series of taunts, jabs, and threats on…