By now, you’ve probably read at least a few reports on mid-year figures for breaches that suggest that 2017 is worse than 2016. In collaboration with Protenus, Inc., DataBreaches.net has worked up some mid-year figures for U.S. breaches involving health/medical data. Join me and Robert Lord of Protenus on Wednesday, August 2 at 1 pm,…
Category: Of Note
Hackers Selling Access to Critical Infrastructure on Darknet
Joshua Philipp reports: Cyber mercenaries are breaching the systems of governments, financial institutions, critical infrastructure, and businesses, then selling access to them on a marketplace on the darknet, a hidden internet accessible only via specialized software. All of this is happening on a darknet black marketplace known as the CMarket or “Criminal Market,” formerly known as…
Greece arrests Russian suspected of running $4 billion bitcoin laundering ring; BTC-e goes unexpectedly offline
Karolina Tagaris , Jack Stubbs and Anna Irrera report: A Russian man suspected of being the anonymous mastermind behind one of the world’s oldest crypto-currency exchanges and of laundering at least $4 billion has been arrested in Greece, police and sources said on Wednesday. Police sources identified him as Alexander Vinnik, 38, who was arrested…
Women’s Health Group of Pennsylvania Notifies 300,000 Patients of Ransomware Attack
Mitch Blacher and David Chang report: A data breach at one of Pennsylvania’s largest health networks has sparked safety concerns and questions regarding why it took several months for patients to be notified. The Women’s Health Care Group of Pennsylvania, which is based in Oaks, Pennsylvania but has 45 offices serving women in Montgomery, Chester…
UK: The National Crime Agency is sending hackers to rehab
Liat Clark reports: At the age of 13, Jake Davis was spending all day, every day on his bedroom computer at his Shetland Islands home. It would be another five years before he discovered an Anonymous chatroom and became part of the hacktivist group, going on to form his own group, Lulzsec. With his new…
Microsoft opens up a new front in the battle against Fancy Bear
John E. Dunn reports: Can anyone – or anything – take on well-resourced nation state hacking groups? Protected by anonymity and plausible deniability, conventional wisdom says not, but conventional wisdom ignores a company like Microsoft wielding a secret weapon with the power to hinder even the cleverest hacking group: lawyers. This, it has emerged, is…