Deb Erdley reports: Pay now, or pay later. Leaders of the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Caucus faced those options when hackers infected their computer system in March 2017, holding it hostage with ransomware. Officials at the Westmoreland County Housing Authority faced the same dilemma when hackers held their computers and phones hostage in July. The Housing…
Category: Miscellaneous
United Nations Accidentally Exposed Passwords and Sensitive Information to the Whole Internet
Micah Lee reports: The United Nations accidentally published passwords, internal documents, and technical details about websites when it misconfigured popular project management service Trello, issue tracking app Jira, and office suite Google Docs. The mistakes made sensitive material available online to anyone with the proper link, rather than only to specific users who should have…
NY: Arc of Erie County fined $200,000 for online security breach
Jonathan D. Epstein has an update to a breach originally reported in March of this year. The Arc of Erie County – a nonprofit social services agency formally known as Heritage Centers – will pay a $200,000 fine to the state, review its policies and analyze its potential electronic security risks after a breach of…
Democratic Party Says It Thwarted Attempted Hack of Voter Database
Update: the phishing attack turned out to be a simulation. See links in the comments below this post. Sheera Frenkel and Jonathan Martin report: The Democratic National Committee said Wednesday that it was alerted to an attempted hack of its voter database this week and that it had notified law enforcement. The effort to target…
Former Brownsville Fire Chief pleads not guilty to computer security breach
CBS reports: Former Brownsville Fire Chief Carlos Elizondo pleaded not guilty to 11 felony counts of computer security breach on Wednesday. Elizondo is accused of accessing the Brownsville Fire Department’s emergency reporting system without consent on 11 occasions from Oct. 29,2017 to Nov. 23, 2017, according to a superseding grand jury indictment unsealed in June….
Wikileaks’ Twitter Chats Exposed as 11,000 Private Messages Posted Online
Jason Murdock reports: More than 11,000 messages from a Twitter group used by WikiLeaks have been posted online in full, exposing private chats between 2015 and 2017. The cabal—populated with around 10 close supporters—was a “low security” group created to share news stories, distribute disclosures, collate freedom of information requests, discuss politics and, in WikiLeaks’ own words,…