Campbell Kwan reports: Fresh off dismissing spying charges against two former Twitter employees and another individual on Tuesday, the US government has unfurled a new superseding indictment that accuses the three individuals of even more offences. The two former Twitter employees, Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah, and the third person named Ahmed Almutairi were originally charged with…
Category: Of Note
Lifespan Pays $1,040,000 to OCR to Settle Unencrypted Stolen Laptop Breach
In April, 2017, Lifespan issued a statement disclosing a stolen laptop incident involving unencrypted protected health information. In at least two places in their statement they claim that they are committed to protecting the security and confidentiality of patient data. Today, OCR announced a settlement with Lifespan in which Lifespan is to pay more than…
A vigilante is sabotaging the Emotet botnet by replacing malware payloads with GIFs
Catalin Cimpanu reports: An unknown vigilante hacker has been sabotaging the operations of the recently-revived Emotet botnet by replacing Emotet payloads with animated GIFs, effectively preventing victims from getting infected. The sabotage, which started three days ago, on July 21, has grown from a simple joke to a serious issue impacting a large portion of the Emotet…
Ongoing Meow attack has nuked >1,000 databases without telling anyone why
In March, thousands of elastic search installations were wiped out and all that was left was a calling card, “NightLionSecurity.com.” Now there’s a new round of attacks using a “Meow” calling card as they wipe out ElasticSearch and MongoDB databases. Dan Goodin reports: More than 1,000 unsecured databases so far have been permanently deleted in…
VA sending letter to 1,501 Montana vets about business associate ransomware incident
The Great Falls Tribune reports: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Veterans Health Administration on Thursday announced actions taken to protect veterans’ personal information following a recent privacy breach involving files from the Montana VA Health Care System. Officials said they were notified June 4, by former contractor Benefits Recovery Specialists Inc. of “a data…
Small Health Care Provider Fails to Implement Multiple HIPAA Security Rule Requirements
There’s been a rare sighting of a 2020 HHS settlement of HIPAA charges. An almost 10-year old report of what would be a relatively small breach led to an investigation that uncovered persistent failures to implement the HIPAA Security Rule. From HHS: Metropolitan Community Health Services (Metro), doing business as Agape Health Services, has agreed…