Mike Cetera writes: Data breaches are a huge and growing problem, but the odds that a cybercriminal will steal your bank or contact information from your smartphone are incredibly small, a new study has found. The biggest security issue facing mobile users is malware — malicious code sometimes hidden in apps — and even that…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
UK law firms investigated 187 times for data protection breaches
John E. Dunn reports: UK law firms were investigated 187 times by the Information Commissioner in 2014 for possible breaches of the Data Protection Act (DPA), a Freedom of Information (FoI) data by encryption firm Egress Software Technologies has revealed. It might be assumed that legal firms would be especially careful with personal data but…
There’s TOO MANY data-leaking healthcare firms, growls Symantec
Darren Pauli reports: Security software company Symantec is being drenched in calls from breached health organisations that have lost devices or suffered an information security snafu. Some 80 per cent of the calls its incident response team has received since December are from healthcare firms, topping the charts for the number of breach incidents for 2014 for…
FL: Teacher’s laptop stolen in rash of St. Augustine Beach car burglaries
Oh, here’s a pleasant change. After a teacher’s laptop was stolen from her car, the reporter asked the St. Johns County School Board whether any student information on the school computer might have been compromised: Officials said all school computers are password-protected and their hard drives are encrypted, so no personal information could have been…
Verizon DBIR challenges data breach cost estimates
Michael Mimoso reports: The 2015 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) did some mythbusting on two fronts: the estimated cost per record lost in a breach is much lower than reported elsewhere; and mobile malware is a no-go. The DBIR is Verizon’s annual data dump collected from breaches it has investigated, along with contributed data from…
Oh, to be a fly on the wall (Crime Stoppers breach update)
If you read my post about the hack involving three Canadian chapters of Crime Stoppers, or if you follow me on Twitter (@pogowasright), you know that I’ve had a frustrating time trying to alert those chapters that they’ve been hacked and need to secure their data better. In the interim, as I browsed the pastes of the hacked data (which…