The Federal Trade Commission today released its annual privacy and security update for 2019, highlighting a record year for enforcement actions aimed at protecting consumer privacy and data security. For example, the Commission levied a $5 billion penalty—the largest consumer privacy penalty ever—against Facebook for violating its 2012 FTC privacy order and imposed new restrictions on the…
Category: Of Note
DoppelPaymer Ransomware Launches Site to Post Victim’s Data
First Maze Team did it. Now DoppelPaymer threat actors have followed suit. Lawrence Abrams reports: The operators of the DoppelPaymer Ransomware have launched a site that they will use to shame victims who do not pay a ransom and to publish any files that were stolen before computers were encrypted. Read more on BleepingComputer.
Update: How many users were affected by the DISA breach?
Andrew Eversden has an update on a breach previously noted on this site: A breach of a system hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Department of Defense’s primary IT support agency, affected “approximately 200,000” users after a malicious actor may have gained access to names and Social Security numbers, according to a Pentagon…
Drug dealer loses codes for €53.6m bitcoin accounts
Who among us hasn’t lost our passwords to $58 million, right? Conor Lally reports: A drug dealer who amassed a €55 million fortune in the cryptocurrency bitcoin has lost the codes to access the accounts after hiding them with his fishing rod, which has now gone missing. The Criminal Assets Bureau (Cab) has confiscated the 12 online…
U.S. and Allies Blame Russia for Cyberattack on Republic of Georgia
David E. Sanger and Marc Santora report: The United States and its key allies on Thursday accused Russia’s main military intelligence agency of a broad cyberattack against the republic of Georgia in October that took out websites and interrupted television broadcasts, in a coordinated effort to deter Moscow from intervening in the 2020 presidential election…
Household Names: How Tetrad Exposed Data on 120 Million Consumers
From UpGuard: The UpGuard Research team can now disclose that a collection of data sets detailing the purchasing habits and consumer behavior profiles of virtually every American household has been secured. The publicly exposed data comes from market analysis company Tetrad but includes data blended from many sources, including Experian Mosaic, Claritas/Nielsen’s PRIZM, and what…