I had first raised concerns about “Smart Sheriff” software back in May when I first heard about it, but now The Citizen Lab has investigated it more and issued a concerning report. Their press release, courtesy of a Canadian reader: Toronto, Canada (20 September 2015) — Today, the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Inside Target Corp., Days After 2013 Breach
Brian Krebs reports: In December 2013, just days after a data breach exposed 40 million customer debit and credit card accounts, Target Corp. hired security experts at Verizon to probe its networks for weaknesses. The results of that confidential investigation — until now never publicly revealed — confirm what pundits have long suspected: Once inside Target’s network, there was nothing stop…
Defamation lawsuit threat, Saturday edition
from the i’m-from-the-supreme-court dept Getting threatened with defamation lawsuits seems to go with the territory of reporting on data breaches. Even when reporting is accurate, some folks seem to think that if they threaten a defamation lawsuit, little sites like this one will just cave in to their demands. As background to this week’s installment of “All…
Brazil’s Cybercrime Problem
Robert Muggah and Nathan Thompson report: Brazil is at the epicenter of a global cybercrime wave. The country ranks second worldwide in online banking fraud and financial malware, and the problem is only getting worse. According to official sources, the number of cyberattacks within the country grew by 197 percent in 2014, and online banking fraud spiked by 40…
AU: Immigration investigation judged ‘unfair’ after asylum seeker data breach
Nicole Hasham reports: Former immigration minister Scott Morrison presided over an “unfair” investigation that ensured asylum seekers were unsuccessful in showing a serious data bungle made it more dangerous to return home, the Federal Court has found. The privacy breach, when the Immigration Department published online the confidential details of almost 10,000 asylum seekers, raised the prospect that…
Burning Down The House – The Wyndham Decision Allows The FTC To Sue Businesses For Getting Hacked
Avery Dial and Rory Eric Jurman of Fowler White Burnett, P.A., write: As it is commonly understood, the Great Fire of London spawned two fixtures of the modern world: advancements in firefighting and property insurance. The risk of fire was seen as a threat to society as a whole and mechanisms to mitigate that risk…