I couldn’t fall asleep last night. It’s not often that a data breach worries me, but what I read online had concerned me. According to a hacker calling himself @PabloEscobarSec, he had hacked the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), and intended to leak the names of all of the women who had used the service….
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Leakage from website poses threat to Chinese netizens
Xiang Yang provides some interesting statistics. Translated by e Xin, People’s Daily Online reports: … By the end of 2011, a total of 26 website were suspected to have users’ information leaked, involving 278 million accounts and passwords, according to the statistics from the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China (CNCERT/CC)….
Data Breach Case Research Paper Sheds Light
Kristin J. Mathews writes: In a draft research paper titled “Empirical Analysis of Data Breach Litigation”, three prominent scholars have collected and analyzed a sample of over 230 federal data breach lawsuits in order to deduce just what makes them tick. Romanosky, Hoffman and Acquisti examined, for example, what factual and legal characteristics made a company more likely to be…
Outsider Hacks Dominated 2011 Security Breaches
Kelly Jackson Higgins reports from RSA: More than 85% of the data breach incident response cases investigated by Verizon Business last year originated from a hack, and more than 90% of them came from the outside rather than via a malicious insider or business partner. Tuesday, Verizon published a snapshot of data from its upcoming…
Another week, another round of Congressional questions and posturing?
How many data breach investigations can one Congress initiate without actually doing anything? What is the point of asking Grindr questions about its security? Hasn’t Congress heard enough by now to know that most companies and apps do not implement adequate security despite what they say on their sites? What, if anything, does Congress intend…
‘Anatomy of an Anonymous Attack’ laid bare by Imperva
Sophie Curtis reports: Security firm Imperva has published a detailed analysis of an attack by Anonymous on one of its customers, providing new insight into how the hacktivist group operates, and highlighting the need for better application layer security. According to The New York Times, the target in question was the Vatican, although Imperva has declined…