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
Are You Prepared for GDPR?
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a topic of growing relevance, not just to its own organizations, but worldwide. Any company that does business in Europe will be affected by the new standards. And yet, preparation for next year’s compliance deadline appears to be an exercise in procrastination. Research from two UK firms—GDPR… Read More
The Facebook Generation
The “Facebook generation,” Australian attorney-general George Brandis calls them, referring presumably to Millennials and those even younger. According to him, this generation is comprised of those who don’t care all that much about privacy, as previous generations have. “In the Facebook generation when people put more and more of their own personal data out there,… Read More
Internet of Risks
The Internet of Things giveth, and the Internet of Things taketh away. Not that this is unexpected. For every new device that gets hooked up to that great, all-reaching cyber squid, for every thermostat or refrigerator or porcelain throne that you might fear will one day go full on HAL 9000, there is a new… Read More
WannaCry? Tears of frustration, maybe
When you think about “the big one” in cybersecurity, you might call to mind the Target breach of 2013, the Anthem breach of 2014, and so on. Although this year isn’t yet halfway through, the worldwide WannaCry malware attack that began last week might be significant enough to merit that position, when we think back… Read More