A recent breach reported by an Arlington, Texas-based pediatric clinic serves is the latest reminder of the substantial risks ransomware poses to patient data and offers a lesson in what can go wrong when responding to such an attack.Continue Reading…
Habitat for Humanity Data Breach: More Than 5,000 People Exposed
A massive data breach earlier this month at Habitat for Humanity exposed the personal information of thousands of individuals, including their Social Security numbers.
Habitat for Humanity of Michigan’s virtual hard drive backups, which contained more than 400GB of information, were discovered online by an Austin-based security researcher in early October. The data is said to have contained hundreds of background and credit check profiles, in addition to roughly 4,600 individual profiles, all of which included Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information.Continue Reading…
Over 3.2 Million Debit Cards May Have Been Compromised, Says National Payment Corporation of India
A total of 3.2 million debit cards across 19 banks may have been compromised as a result of a suspected malware attack. The breach, possibly largest of its kind in India, was confirmed by the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) in a statement today. The problem was brought to NPCI’s attention via complaints from banks informing the agency that their customers’ cards were used fraudulently, mainly in China and USA, while customers were in India, according to the statement.Continue Reading…
Red Cross Data Breach Hits 1.3 Million Donors
Businesses are being warned to keep track of sensitive customer data after Australia experienced its largest data breach to date last Friday. Last week it was revealed that records of close to 1.3 million Red Cross blood donors were leaked online in the form of a single database file.Continue Reading…
Electronics Buyback Scam Taken Offline
It seems like manufacturers are coming out with new smartphones, tablets and other devices at a faster clip year after year. People who upgraded and were looking to get some money back for their old devices may have been tempted by some websites that promised to pay top dollar. As a result of the lawsuit filed by the FTC and the State of Georgia, a federal court just put a stop to one company running several buyback websites because it wasn’t keeping up its end of the bargain.Continue Reading…
Tales from the Encrypted: Ransomware Horror Stories
Scared of what users might unleash when they go “click” in the night?
You’re not alone. Recently IT pros with first-hand experience grappling with ransomware were asked to share their stories. The tales they told were equal parts frightening and enlightening. To save you the horror of going through what they did we’re sharing six of their most important lessons learned.Continue Reading…
Marai Aftermath: Huge Recall Could Affect You
Chinese manufacturer Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology will recall up to 10,000 webcams in the wake of massive distributed denial-of-service attacks driven, at least in part, by infected internet of things devices, Reuters reports.Continue Reading…
Baystate Health in Springfield Reveals 13K Patients Potentially Affected
A “phishing” email scam that befell Baystate Health may have exposed the personal data of 13,000 patients.
Baystate announced the breach Friday, adding that it has no evidence any of the compromised information has been taken or abused. But the health system did start notifying potentially exposed patients via letters mailed late this week.Continue Reading…
How do Hackers Hack your Passwords?
Is your password strong enough? It is the only thing keeping your life private. In late 2012, a password-cracking expert unveiled a computer cluster that can cycle through as many as 350 billion guesses per second. It’s an almost unprecedented speed that can try every possible Windows passcode in the typical enterprise in less than six hours. He then used the machine to crack 90 percent of the 6.5 million password hashes belonging to users of LinkedIn. In addition to the power of his hardware, his attack was aided by a 500 million-strong word list and a variety of advanced programming rules.Continue Reading…
Why What Happened to the Internet Last Week Matters
Somebody finally did what internet experts have been fearing for years.
That somebody was able to manipulate millions of internet-connected dumb devices, like surveillance cameras and DVRs, possibly by getting into their automatic software updates or simply by guessing the devices’ default passwords. Once that password is known — most are never changed, and some may even be hard-coded so they can’t be — virtually all the devices of that type can be accessed and turned into bots.