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…
Category: Of Note
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…
Huge Swedish Data Leak Punished With (Only?) Half a Month’s Paycheck
Catalin Cimpanu reports: The Swedish government has exposed sensitive details on millions of citizens in one of the biggest government screw-ups ever, and the official responsible for the whole fiasco was fined only half of her’s monthly salary, which is 70,000 Swedish krona — or around $8,500. The leak happened in September 2015, when the…
“BestBuy” Admits to Hijacking Deutsche Telekom Routers With Mirai Malware
I was just thinking about this guy last night, and woke up to see that Catalin Cimpanu has an update on him: A 29-year-old man pleaded guilty in court on Friday to hijacking over 900,000 routers from the network of Deutsche Telekom, according to several reports in the German press [1, 2, 3, 4]. The…
U.S. Dept. Of Education Encourages Indiana To Improve Data Security
Claire McInerny reports: The U.S. Department of Education (USED) sent a letter to Superintendent Jennifer McCormick this month outlining problems with the Indiana Department of Education’s security around student data. The state receives grant money from USED for implementing security systems, which opened the state up to an audit. According to the USED letter, the audit’s “objective…