Jeffrey Dennis and Heather Whitehead of Newmeyer Dillion write: Most organizations are now requiring that their employees work from home (“WFH”) with the ongoing COVID-19 (commonly referred to as the Coronavirus) pandemic. These remote working arrangements provide new opportunities for hackers to infiltrate computer systems, and not surprisingly, attempted cyber attacks are on the rise. …
Category: Of Note
Hacking against corporations surges as workers take computers home
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…
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…