Liam Tung reports that there’s a new twist to ransomware: attackers are not only encrypting the data, but stealing it and then threatening to leak it if their victim doesn’t pay up. Well, extortion demands (pay us or we’ll sell or dump your data) is nothing new, but I guess combining it with encrypting the…
Category: Other
Indian Airtel: Bug meant users’ personal data was found not secure
Shadab Nazmi reports: A bug had been found in India’s third largest mobile network which could have exposed the personal data of more than 300 million users. The flaw, discovered in the Application Program Interface (API) of Airtel’s mobile app, could have been used by hackers to access subscribers’ information using just their numbers. That…
Cn: Credit Rating Firm Kaola Accused of Privacy Breach
Wu Yujian, Zhang Yuzhe and Han Wei report: Kaola Credit, the credit rating service of leading payment company Lakala Payment, was accused of illegally storing and selling users’ personal data for millions of dollars, a case underscoring concerns about privacy breaches in the country’s booming fintech sector. Beijing-based Kaola Credit was among seven companies caught…
Attempted sextortion leads to call for stricter phone porting rules
Thomas Daigle reports: When Randall Baran-Chong received a notification on his smartphone late one night last week indicating the device was no longer in service, it was the first sign of trouble. […] In the hours that followed, the 33-year-old Toronto businessman says someone locked down his laptop, purchased an Xbox video game gift card…
Undetermined number of patient medical records lost in Bahamas
Every so often, we see an incident that is due to forces of nature or some environmental event. Here’s one from the Great Bahamas: There was a significant number of patient medical records lost at the Rand Memorial Hospital, during the passage of Hurricane Dorian, Public Hospitals Authority (PHA) Managing Director Catherine Weech said yesterday….
Another Civil Case Launched Against AT&T for Allegedly Failing to Prevent Crypto Theft
Cali Haan reports: A plaintiff called Seth Shapiro is suing telco giant AT&T for its role in allegedly allowing hackers to access his cellphone on four occasions and enable the theft of $1.8 million USD in cryptocurrencies from his crypto exchange accounts. SIM-swapping is a type of hack in which cybercriminals arrange with a telco employee to…