Sheila A. Millar and Tracy P. Marshall of Keller & Heckman write: Third-party service providers are vital to many companies and they handle a wide range of business activities essential for companies to deliver their own offerings. But a company is not adequately protecting consumers if it fails to perform proper due diligence on service…
Category: Unauthorized Access
Dallas man convicted of computer fraud, aggravated identity theft in hacking of New York-based tech company
Mathew Richards reports: Following a five-day trial, a Dallas man was convicted on Friday on charges for computer fraud and aggravated identity theft in connection with his hacking of a New York-based technology company, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Albany Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 30-year-old Tyler C. King…
MESSAGETAP: Who’s Reading Your Text Messages?
Raymond Leong, Dan Perez, and Tyler Dean report: FireEye Mandiant recently discovered a new malware family used by APT41 (a Chinese APT group) that is designed to monitor and save SMS traffic from specific phone numbers, IMSI numbers and keywords for subsequent theft. Named MESSAGETAP, the tool was deployed by APT41 in a telecommunications network…
Prosecution drops five felony charges against Justin Shafer, accepts plea to one misdemeanor charge
In May 2016, the Dallas FBI raided dental integrator and independent researcher Justin Shafer because of allegations that he had accessed an FTP server without authorization. Shafer was subsequently raided twice more, and in March 2017, he was arrested and charged with stalking a federal employee – not hacking or any criminal conduct related to…
Lawsuit against Rensselaer County partially revived on medical privacy issue
There’s an update to an insider-wrongdoing lawsuit that I first noted back in September, 2013, after some employees at Rensselaer County Jail filed suit against their employer for snooping in their medical records. As I’ve reported in the past, the breaches occurred against a backdrop where the county jail uses Samaritan Hospital to provide services…
9th Circuit: It’s a federal crime to visit a website after being told not to visit it
Orin Kerr writes: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has handed down a very important decision on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Facebook v. Vachani, which I flagged just last week. For those of us worried about broad readings of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the decision is quite troubling. Its reasoning appears…