David Weldon writes: While retailers and healthcare organizations have dominated much of the data breach media attention in recent weeks, a new study finds that the nation’s colleges and universities are at even greater risk for cyberattacks. In an email to FierceCIO, the security firm BitSight Technologies shared highlights of its new research report, “Powerhouses and…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
The FTC’s Controversial Battle To Force Companies To Protect Your Data
Kashmir Hill writes: Hacker conference Defcon has a long tradition of playing “spot the fed,” a game that involves outing government types who attend under the radar to learn about the latest hacking tricks and those who are expert at developing them. There was little challenge in the game this August when it came to…
Heartbleed Not Only Reason For Health Systems Breach
Community Health Systems’ bad patching practices are nothing compared to its poor encryption, network monitoring, fraud detection, and data segmentation, experts say. Read more on Dark Reading. If HHS wants to go after CHS, this article certainly lays out the technical security safeguards that may not have been in place.
Hacking Exposed 78% Of All Records Compromised In First Half Of 2014
RiskBased Security reports: We are pleased to release our Data Breach QuickView report that shows that 2014 is on pace to replace 2013 as the highest year on record for exposed records, and the recently reported exposure of 1.2 billion email addresses and user names has not been included. The 1331 incidents reported during the first half…
Is your firm violating the Data Protection Act or begging for a hack of its Twitter account? (updated)
ThreeUK, who claim to have a 45% share of all mobile traffic in the UK, has a social media presence on Facebook and Twitter. They also have a dangerous practice of requesting customers provide personal details such as full name, phone number, postcode, and date of birth via direct messages (DM) to their support team, e.g.,…
Comptroller DiNapoli: Schools Must Do More to Limit Access to Sensitive Student Databases
Yes, it’s as bad as I’ve been saying for years. Now if they will just audit the NYC Department of Education, too. Employees in six upstate New York school districts had inappropriate computer access to sensitive student data and were able to change student grades and attendance records without proper authorization, according to an audit released today…