Edmund H. Mahony reports: Spain on Friday turned over notorious Russian computer hacker Peter Yuryevich Levashov to FBI cyber detectives in New Haven, who have accused him of developing the Kelihos network of hundreds of thousands of infected computers and using it to stuff inboxes with spam, steal secret financial data and spew malicious programming…
Category: Of Note
Massachusetts AG Healey Launches Online Data Breach Reporting Portal
Note the last paragraph in the following press release. We’ll have a bit more ready transparency about breaches reported to Massachusetts, but in terms of numbers, we will only see the number of Massachusetts residents affected. That’s still better than what we have right now, though, so good news! BOSTON – Making it easier and more…
People are taking Equifax to small-claims court via chatbot — and winning
Ethan Wolff-Mann reports: In September, entrepreneur Joshua Browder’s Do Not Pay chatbot website added a new skill: allowing people to sue Equifax for its monumental data breach that exposed the personal information of 145.5 million people, which included Social Security numbers. A few months later, the results are coming in and people are winning judgements…
Court Declines to Dismiss Claims Against Business Associate Subcontractor Responsible for HIPAA Breach
CVS Pharmacy, Inc. v. Press America, Inc., 2018 WL 318479 (S.D.N.Y. 2018) A federal court has declined to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) against a mail service that violated the HIPAA privacy rule when it misaddressed mail and improperly disclosed protected health information (PHI) of 41 individuals. The PBM, which…
Fresenius Medical Care North America settles HHS OCR complaint for $3.5m plus corrective action plan
Fresenius Medical Care North America (FMCNA) has agreed to pay $3.5 million to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR), and to adopt a comprehensive corrective action plan, in order to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules. FMCNA…
HHS OCR January 2018 OCR Cybersecurity Newsletter: Cyber Extortion
January 30, 2018 Incidents of cyber extortion have risen steadily over the past couple of years and, by many estimates, will continue to be a major source of disruption for many organizations. Cyber extortion can take many forms, but it typically involves cybercriminals’ demanding money to stop (or in some cases, to merely delay) their…