Joseph Menn reports: Hacking activity against corporations in the United States and other countries more than doubled by some measures last month as digital thieves took advantage of security weakened by pandemic work-from-home policies, researchers said. […] Software and security company VMWare Carbon Black said this week that ransomware attacks it monitored jumped 148% in…
Category: Of Note
FBI says state hackers have broken into US coronavirus research: report
Fox News reports: Foreign government hackers have broken into companies conducting research into COVID-19 treatment and the U.S. healthcare sector, an FBI official reportedly said. Tonya Ugoretz, the FBI Deputy Assistant Director, told participants in an online panel discussion on Thursday that the bureau has seen state-backed hackers looking at a series of healthcare and research institutions. Read more…
You’re One Misconfiguration Away from a Cloud-Based Data Breach
Suresh Kasinathan writes: Not all instances of data exposure in the cloud are the product of malicious intentions from either internal or external actors. In its “2019 Data Breach Investigations Report” (DBIR), for instance, Verizon Enterprise showed that errors constituted one of the top causes in the data breaches it examined. Verizon’s researchers attributed 21%…
Equifax settles Indiana case over massive data breach for $19.5 million
Nate Raymond reports: Equifax Inc will pay Indiana $19.5 million to resolve claims it failed to protect residents whose personal information was exposed in a data breach that affected 147 million people, the state’s attorney general said on Monday. Read more on Reuters.
Another Court Significantly Limits the Scope of Criminal CFAA–Sandvig v. Barr
Eric Goldman writes: The plaintiffs want to create fake job profiles to research algorithmic discrimination. Fearing that their research activities would expose them to criminal CFAA prosecution, they challenged the CFAA as violating their First Amendment rights. Venkat blogged a preliminary ruling in the case 2 years ago. Now, the court dismisses the researchers’ suit as moot…
Over 500,000 Zoom accounts sold on hacker forums, the dark web
Lawrence Abrams reports: Over 500 hundred thousand Zoom accounts are being sold on the dark web and hacker forums for less than a penny each, and in some cases, given away for free. These credentials are gathered through credential stuffing attacks where threat actors attempt to login to Zoom using accounts leaked in older data…