The Federal Trade Commission today issued a policy statement affirming that health apps and connected devices that collect or use consumers’ health information must comply with the Health Breach Notification Rule, which requires that they notify consumers and others when their health data is breached. In a policy statement adopted during an open meeting, the Commission noted…
Category: Of Note
Walgreens’ Covid-19 test registration system exposed — and still exposes? — patient data
Sara Morrison reports: If you got a Covid-19 test at Walgreens, your personal data — including your name, date of birth, gender identity, phone number, address, and email — was left on the open web for potentially anyone to see and for the multiple ad trackers on Walgreens’ site to collect. In some cases, even…
Education Department Updates Rules and Criminal Penalties for Accessing Agency Data
Aaron Boyd reports: The Education Department is rolling out new rules for accessing and handling agency data by third parties—including students, parents and loan companies—with updated criminal penalties for anyone not following the new statutes. The new rules intend to bring the department into compliance with the 2019 Stop Student Debt Relief Scams Act and…
All of Desert Wells Family Medicine patients’ electronic health records were corrupted and unrecoverable from ransomware attack
On August 30, HHS added Queen Creek Medical Center d/b/a Desert Wells Family Medicine in Arizona to its public breach tool. The entity had reported that 35,000 patients were impacted by a breach involving a hack of the network. We now have more details on that incident available thanks to a public disclosure of their…
New .avos2 variant: AvosLocker affiliate extorts $ 85k from victim thanks to old vulnerability in FortiGate VPN
Marco A. De Felice reports: An affiliate of the AvosLocker ransomware group extorts $ 85,000 in bitcoin from a company thanks to a known vulnerability in FortiGate VPN ( CVE-2018-13379 ). A vulnerability that the American multinational had corrected THANKS TO AN UPDATE released IN NOVEMBER 2019 . Those who have not updated their systems are a small company that…
Hackers leak passwords for 500,000 Fortinet VPN accounts
Lawrence Abrams reports: A threat actor has leaked a list of almost 500,000 Fortinet VPN login names and passwords that were allegedly scraped from exploitable devices last summer. While the threat actor states that the exploited Fortinet vulnerability has since been patched, they claim that many VPN credentials are still valid. Read more on BleepingComputer.