Washington D.C., March 9, 2023 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Blackbaud Inc., a South Carolina-based public company that provides donor data management software to non-profit organizations, agreed to pay $3 million to settle charges for making misleading disclosures about a 2020 ransomware attack that impacted more than 13,000 customers. The SEC’s…
Category: Of Note
EPA Requires States to Address the Cybersecurity of Public Water Systems
Ashden Fein, Micaela McMurrough, Caleb Skeath, and Matthew Harden of Covington & Burling write: On March 3, 2023, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) published a memorandum requiring states to evaluate the cybersecurity of operational technology used by public water systems (“PWSs”) “when conducting PWS sanitary surveys or through other state programs.” EPA’s memorandum “interprets the…
Medusa claims responsibility for Minneapolis Public Schools’ “encryption event,” provides proof of how much data they accessed
There’s another update to the “encryption event” first disclosed by Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) in February. As of their most recent last update, MPS had stated that they had been able to restore systems and no ransom had been paid. At that time, DataBreaches had not found any gang claiming responsibility for the breach or…
Germany and Ukraine hit two high-value ransomware targets
On 28 February 2023, the German Regional Police (Landeskriminalamt Nordrhein-Westfalen) and the Ukrainian National Police (Націона́льна полі́ція Украї́ни), with support from Europol, the Dutch Police (Politie) and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations, targeted suspected core members of the criminal group responsible for carrying out large-scale cyberattacks with the DoppelPaymer ransomware. This ransomware appeared…
Medicare under attack: Healthcare data breaches increase fraud risks
Melissa D. Berry reports: Stealing Medicare beneficiary identification numbers has become the latest goal for cybercriminals who see this data as even more valuable than stolen credit cards. A South Florida man pled guilty in federal court in late-January to “conspiring to buy and sell more than 2.6 million Medicare beneficiary identification numbers” and other…
FTC Publishes Blog Post on Data Security Practices for Complex Systems
Caleb Skeath, Shayan Karbassi, and Ashden Fein of Covington & Burling write: In February, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) published a blog post that elucidated key security principles from recent FTC data security and privacy orders. Specifically, the FTC highlighted three practices that the Commission regards as “effectively protect[ing] user data.” These practices include: (1) offering multi-factor…