The National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force (NCIJTF) has released a new joint-seal ransomware fact sheet. This educational product is intended to provide the public important information on the current ransomware threat and the government’s response, as well as common infection vectors, tools for attack prevention, and important contacts in the event of a ransomware…
Category: Of Note
Contractor for USAO Southern District of Iowa Provided Sensitive, Non-Public Info on Criminal Investigations to a Friend; Informants Wound Up “Outed” Online
An Iowa woman pleaded guilty today for unlawfully using a former Department of Justice contractor’s government computer to access government records and to obtain sensitive, non-public law enforcement information, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas L. McQuaid of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. According to admissions made in connection with her guilty plea, Rachel Manna,…
Democrats propose bill to protect privacy, data security amid growing use of pandemic-related tech
Anuja Vaidya reports: Technology is the linchpin of the United States’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic. But the growing use of digital solutions raises the complicated issue of ensuring individuals’ right to privacy. Now, a group of Congressional Democrats have introduced a bill to address this concern. The Public Health Emergency Privacy Act would set enforceable privacy…
CEO who lied to thousands of patients by telling them they had less than six months to live in order to enroll them in hospice sentenced to prison
There are bad breaches, and then there are the ones where words like “despicable,” “evil,” “immoral,” “disgusting,” and “reprehensible” just seem too weak to express how decent people might feel. This case out of Texas is one of those. Here is DOJ’s press release issued today: The CEO of a Texas-based group of hospice and…
Unemployment fraud in one state and a breach while investigating unemployment fraud in another state
Unemployment fraud is a rampant problem these days. Even investigating it can increase the risk of fraud, it seems. Betty Lin-Fisher reports that hundreds of thousands of Ohioans have become victims, and they generally are first finding out because the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) started sending out 1099 tax statements showing…
Report: American Cable and Internet Giant Comcast Exposed Development Database Online
This is a leak that deserves its own post. Website Planet reports: On December 1st, 2020 the WebsitePlanet research team in cooperation with Security Researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered a non-password protected database that contained over 1.5 billion records. There were references to Comcast throughout the database including multiple subdomains, urls, and internal IP addresses. The publicly visible…