Darren Pauli reports: Desperate companies are buying off data thieves and extortionists to recover stolen data, according to experts. They claim it is “common” for some businesses operating in Australia to pay ransoms to hackers and disgruntled employees to re-secure sensitive information or prevent illicit corporate activities from becoming public. Law firm MMLC Group managing…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
The state of data security – or lack thereof – in NY school districts
Yesterday, I posted an item about a Lindenhurst school district audit that indicated that a school district’s funds had been illegally transferred back in 2007 and that the district had not detected the problem. Last month, a similar situation occurred with the Duanesburg School District, also in New York. Dee Alpert, publisher of The Special…
Report Details Hacks Targeting Google, Others
Kim Zetter reports: It’s been three weeks since Google announced that it and numerous other U.S. companies were targeted in a recent sophisticated and coordinated hack attack dubbed Operation Aurora. Until now we’ve only known that the attackers got in through a vulnerability in Internet Explorer and that they obtained intellectual property and access to…
Cybercrime Checks Into The Hotel Industry
Andy Greenberg reports: Over the past year America’s hotels have had some uninvited guests: a wave of increasingly sophisticated invasions by organized cybercriminals. That’s one finding of a report that cybersecurity researcher Nicholas Percoco plans to present Tuesday at the Black Hat security conference in Arlington, Va. His data shows a spike in hacking incidents…
UK: Incidents of identity theft up by 32pc
Justin Harper reports: The recession has led to a surge in financial fraud with identity theft up by almost a third, latest industry figures have revealed. A worrying trend is emerging where criminals take over the running of your bank account and transfer funds into an account they have set up to accept these bogus…
HIPAA complaints decreased significantly in 2009
The following is cross-posted from PHIprivacy.net: Dennis Melamed provides monthly HIPAA complaint statistics based reports by the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR). It seems that not only did breach reports in general decline in 2009 relative to 2008, but privacy and security complaints to HHS also declined. Melamed reports: OCR received 7,116 complaints in…