Zack Whittaker reports: A spyware app designed to “monitor everything” on a victim’s phone has been secretly installed on thousands of phones. The app, KidsGuard, claims it can “access all the information” on a target device, including its real-time location, text messages, browser history, access to its photos, videos and app activities, and recordings of phone…
Category: Of Note
Protenus releases its analysis of 2019 health data breaches
Protenus’s 2020 BreachBarometer is now available for free downloading. From their highlights: Our analysis is based on 572 health data breaches reported to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the media, or some other source during 2019 (Figure 1). As in years past, we do not have numbers for every incident in…
Cop’s Strip Club Dancer Plate Search May Test Scope of Hack Law
Sara Merken reports: The U.S. Supreme Court may decide if someone who improperly uses their authorized computer access, such as a cop looking up a strip club dancer’s license plate as a favor, can be liable under a federal anti-hacking law. A December petition seeks the high court review because appeals courts are split on…
Iranian hackers have been hacking VPN servers to plant backdoors in companies around the world
Catalin Cimpanu reports: 2019 will be remembered as the year when major security bugs were disclosed in a large number of enterprise VPN servers, such as those sold by Pulse Secure, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Citrix. Read more on ZDNet.
1 in 6 Massachusetts Communities Hit by ‘Ransomware’ Attacks
Ryan Kath and Jim Haddadin report: Inside the Bay State, a handful of attacks against cities and towns have garnered widespread attention, though the problem may be more prevalent than many imagine. Records obtained by the NBC10 Boston Investigators show dozens of Massachusetts communities have quietly negotiated ransomware attacks, sometimes taking days or weeks to…
Threat Vector Number 1
Britton White is a cybersecurity & HIPAA Compliance advisor. The following article is reproduced with his kind permission. Email is the bane of our existence and the number one threat vector….. there’s no other way to say it. I’ve rummaged through over 30 hospitals and hundreds of clinics (some multiple times) in my time conducting…