Andrea Peterson reports: Wikileaks posted a massive trove of internal Democratic National Committee emails online Friday, in what the organization dubbed the first of a new “Hillary Leaks” series. The cache includes nearly 20,000 emails and over 8,000 file attachments from the inboxes of seven key staffers at the political party, including communications director Luis…
Category: Of Note
Denmark sent sensitive health data to Chinese by mistake
This may be one of the most epic fails disclosed in 2016. There is just so much wrong here…. Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen of Reuters reports: Sensitive health information about almost the entire population of Denmark ended up in the wrong hands when a letter by mistake was sent to a Chinese visa office in Copenhagen, the Danish…
Computer hack helped feed an Islamic State death list
Tim Johnson reports: The attack seemed like a garden-variety digital holdup. A computer intruder, calling himself the “Albanian hacker,” left a message for the administrator of a website for an Illinois internet retailer: Pay two Bitcoins, or about $500 at the time, and the intruder would “remove all bugs on your shop!” Such demands are…
New HHS guidance on Ransomware and HIPAA
I hate it when I tweet something but forget to post it. In today’s installment of “Smacking Myself in the Forehead,” I remember to tell readers that HHS has issued a new guidance on ransomware and HIPAA. A recent U.S. Government interagency report indicates that, on average, there have been 4,000 daily ransomware attacks since…
Should you pay a hacker’s ransom?
Carl Herberger of Radware writes: If someone locked down your pacemaker, what would you pay to regain control? If hackers took over a cockpit or locomotive, what would you pay for restitution? This is the future of ransomware that we’ll almost certainly see if the evolution of these threats holds course. Any time human safety…
OHSU pays nearly $3 million over two data breaches in 2013
Lynn Terry has the scoop on what appears to be a new HHS resolution agreement. There’s nothing up on HHS’s site or in my mailbox yet about this one, but I had covered the four breaches mentioned in her report as well as a more recent breach (search OHSU). Oregon Health & Science University has…