In response to a recent news story out of Midlothian (noted here), an editorial in The Journal Times reminds law enforcement that they should take their own advice and not pay ransom to hackers who lock up police files. As the editors note, the Midlothian incident is not the first time law enforcement has paid ransom: Last…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Report on Cybersecurity Practices
via BeSpacific: FINRA Report on Cybersecurity Practices, February 2015 – Executive Summary: Like many organizations in the financial services and other sectors, broker-dealers (firms) are the target of cyberattacks. The frequency and sophistication of these attacks is increasing and individual broker-dealers, and the industry as a whole, must make responding to these threats a high priority….
It may look good, but that data breach report is not necessarily accurate
Two analyses of data breaches in 2014 have been released within the past month. One is Gemalto’s annual Breach Level Index report (pdf), which is based on 1,541 breach reports resulting in 1,023,108,267 breached records. The other is Risk Based Security’s Data Breach Quick View (pdf), which is based on 3,014 incidents exposing 1,068,191,345 records. How can an analysis that…
K-State assistant professor: Computer hackers have value in society
Roy Wenzl reports: Kevin Steinmetz, a criminologist at Kansas State University, has studied and met a lot of hackers and he sees value in them. Hacker culture is far more diverse, more interesting, more valuable and more sophisticated than most of us realize, he said. […] His latest work, “An Ethnographic Study of Hacking,” has…
Say What? Required contents of notice in data breach notifications
Fer O’Neil did some comparisons of state laws on the content of notices. His write-up of what he found is well worth reading. Here’s a snippet from it: The first metric I looked at was the number of states and territories that had some required content of notice. I was a little surprised that 63% (31…
Time for an Updated Cyber Risk Approach; BPI Data Breach
Judy Selby and George Viegas write: Our traditional approach to cyber risk and security has been focused on privacy and financial data. The data breach or loss concerns that typically rank high on our risk ratings are private and confidential data like names and social security numbers with other identifying non-public information and financial data…