Bolstering cyber defenses to deal with evolving threats
Cyber criminals continue to get more sophisticated in their attacks. We have alluded to this before, but the cost of data breaches rises each year. This is especially true for the healthcare industry, where a breach can incur a cost of over $6 million and counting. Schools and government agencies have likewise found themselves targeted… Read More
Data security risks targeting all industries
The eSports market is one of the fastest growing among entertainment industries. In 2019, worldwide revenues of virtual or in-person video game competitions, totaled $957.5 million, a number which is expected to exceed $1.6 billion by 2024. Like any online medium, however, this still fledgling enterprise finds itself having to contend not just with cheating… Read More
Student data breaches and expanded guidelines for health information
Any company engaging in the sharing of personal health information (PHI) for advertising purposes may soon find itself subject to new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rules. New guidance extends previous controls to the formerly ambiguous domain of applications and devices that share health data. Failure to comply looks to invite agency enforcement in the future…. Read More
Protecting Intellectual Property From Hackers
Last week saw a data breach announcement from Samsung, which the company publicly acknowledged and for which the hacking group Lapsus$ 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… Read More
Protecting Critical Services from Cybercriminals
Last year’s targeted attack against the Colonial Pipeline brought into sharper focus the risk utilities face from cyber crime. Data has always been a valuable resource for those who possess it, now more so than ever; as breaches of critical utilities show, it can also be a weapon. If a retailer’s online platform gets breached,… Read More
Cyber criminals adjusting their tactics to target data
Examination of law enforcement successes against ransomware agents in recent years reveals a resulting adjustment among cyber criminals. Despite some important figures of criminal gangs being apprehended, many who remain have learned from the experience and are switching their focus to demanding higher ransoms in place of a wider attack net. Rather than incur the… Read More
Hacker apprehended while the group remains at large
When you hear about something called The Dark Overlord, you might expect it to be something related to a movie or video game. Not so, here, with a Canadian hacker being sentenced to three years in prison for dealing in stolen personal information, including doing business with a hacking and extortion group with that moniker…. Read More
Crypto.com and rising data breach numbers
Surprising possibly no one, the latest annual report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) shows that the number of data breaches rose 68% in 2021 compared to the year before. Every industry except the military experienced an increase in the number of breaches. Similarly, ransomware has doubled in use in each of the past… Read More
Hard drive file leads to data breach
The time before a data breach is the most important period in an organization’s data security practice. The variety of ways in which employees can accidentally compromise everything speaks to the value of ensuring the data on a network is worthless to intruders, even after a breach. Incidents like the breach of the Rhode Island… Read More
Log4J bug hits everything, everywhere
Engineers at Google and scores of other tech companies have endured a less than pleasant couple of weeks, ever since the discovery of the log4j bug. It has been described as the most serious data breach ever, due to the sheer volume of online services that use the log4j code, which helps applications track their… Read More