Protecting Intellectual Property From Hackers

Last week saw a data breach announcement from Samsung, which the company publicly acknowledged and for which the hacking group Lapsus$ claimed responsibility.  Luckily for Samsung customers, this does not appear to have been a case of compromised user data.  Rather, the hackers posted that they had stolen 190 gigabytes of company source code for Galaxy-branded devices, which include smartphones and tablets.  Samsung nevertheless denied that the incident would have any impact on business operations.

For any organization with sensitive data, the only risk on par with letting cyber crooks get at customer information is compromised intellectual property.  Avoiding legal consequences from wronged customers in search of restitution is only a partial escape if you have to worry about your company’s own critical data being used for ransom, sold to competitors, and so on.  NetLib Security’s Encryptionizer solution has been deployed by organizations in various industries to protect their customers’ personally identifiable information (PII), personal health information (PHI), as well as their own proprietary data that needs no less measure of security.

In addition to this incident, Lapsus$ is also suspected as the culprits behind a couple of other high-profile attacks, one allegedly against the graphics card giant NVIDIA and another against the video game company Ubisoft.  The former involved the South American-based hackers’ unusual demand to remove limiters on cryptocurrency mining.  This appears to be the group’s standard agenda: eschewing ransom for other specific demands.

NVIDIA was somewhat cagey on acknowledging the particulars of the event, but noted that IT resources had indeed been affected and some proprietary information stolen.  According to Forbes, moreover, stolen code-signing certificates have since been spotted in malware attacks against Windows devices.  Ubisoft’s own security incident resulted in disruption of its games, systems and services.  The company is being similarly tight-lipped about specifics, but it appears the incident at least forced a company-wide password refresh.

As cybersecurity advisor at ESET Jake Moore says, many “bad actors have just gone straight to releasing the data without a ransom note, leaving the targeted victims scrambling around trying to reduce the impact where possible.”  In the face of various and multi-faceted scenarios as these, NetLib Security works with firms in numerous verticals to provide transparent data encryption as part of a strong defensive posture against cyber criminals.