The Never-ending story: Equifax
I don’t prefer to write about the same subject time after time, but in Equifax’s case, new wrinkles just keep popping up. Seemingly every day brings another update in the news. Yesterday, it came out that on top of everything else, the Equifax breach also exposed driver’s license data for around 11 million people. Combined… Read More
Demands for data protection reform after Equifax
At the first of several hearings before a Congressional subcommittee, former Equifax CEO Richard Smith faced bipartisan reproach and questioning about the company’s massive data breach. Coupled with the previous day’s revelation of another, initial data breach in March, and the tally of potentially affected consumers rising by 2.5 million, Equifax is certainly on the… Read More
Bridging the Data Breach Confidence Gap
Confidence is a beneficial trait to have, but an excess can get you into trouble. As I’ve said before, companies who overestimate their cyber protection capabilities leave themselves open to a rude awakening when a security incident strikes. Despite Gartner’s prediction of $90 billion spent on security this year, this false expectation continues to be… Read More
Hackers Beat Out Insiders
Here is a surprising stat. While we’ve often talked about the prevalence of insider threats, and how they are usually the leading cause of data breaches, July was the first month that hacking actually took precedence. Usually, this is reversed, but in both occurrence and severity, hacking won out this time. According to the report… Read More
Blurring the Boundaries: DNA Hacking
Benchmarks in the perpetual blurring between science fiction and reality are constantly being reached. Last week, another made news when researchers from the University of Washington announced they had successfully used actual DNA to hack into a computer system. Although the potential for using DNA for data storage had been shown last year, in this… Read More
Stiffer Penalties for Security Failure
It’s strange how things work sometimes. Just as I’m writing about Game of Thrones last week, HBO gets hacked and several episode scripts leaked, among other content. Aside from what has already been posted online, it’s not known what was included in the 1.5 terabytes of data the hackers claim to have stolen. Even the… Read More
Phishing is Coming
“We have not seen the biggest attack yet,” says Jorge Rey, director of information security and compliance at advisory firm Kaufman Rossin. This statement, part of an interview with Healthcare Informatics about the current state of cybersecurity in healthcare, is part of Rey’s assertion that an ‘Enron’-scale attack, one that dwarfs even WannaCry and Petya,… Read More
Sweden Exposes All the Data
How can any one group in a specific situation do just about everything wrong? The Swedish Transport Agency is making headlines now as the next big data breach, demonstrating levels of judgment that make George Costanza look wise. Back in 2015, this government agency made a deal with IBM to migrate their data to the… Read More
AI Solutions and a Host of Cyber Threats
Our current data-centric system is one of freer data sharing and access across an enterprise. This integrated, non-segmented paradigm, for all the problems it solves, still creates vulnerabilities. Machine learning solutions, meanwhile, seemingly get more advanced every time they pop up in the news. At this juncture, they have already become viable, reliable tools for… Read More
Verizon Vendor Vulnerability
After all the hassle Verizon must have experienced over the course of their purchase of Yahoo—considering the massive breaches the latter confronted—this was surely not something the company wanted to add to its next newsletter. Unfortunately, the telecommunications giant has just confirmed a data breach of its own. Not quite on the scale of Yahoo’s… Read More