Archive for October, 2017

Phishing an International Cybersecurity Conference

Thursday, October 26th, 2017

You’ve got to admit, it takes guts to target attendees of an international cybersecurity conference with phishing attacks, but that’s just what one hacker group is doing. A cybersecurity conference, the International Conference on Cyber Conflicts, is going to be held November 7 and 8 in Washington, DC and is being put together by the US Military […]

Hackers Attacking Schools

Thursday, October 26th, 2017

Move over, healthcare industry, hackers have a new easy target: our nation’s schools. Dozens of school districts have been hit by hackers this year alone. It’s the new easy target, as most school systems haven’t felt the need to worry about cybersecurity up to now. Most teachers and administrators aren’t very aware of cybersecurity practices, […]

How Your Interests Can Get You Hacked

Thursday, October 26th, 2017

By now we’ve all had to pretty much accept that our interests and habits are being mined for advertisers. Your phone knows where you go and what apps you use. The reason we get free services like Facebook and Twitter is that our information is sold to advertisers, and they tag that information to you […]

Beware the Bad Rabbit Ransomware

Thursday, October 26th, 2017

A new ransomware is spreading around the world. It’s already hit a number of European countries, may or may not have hit the US, and has even affected Interfax, a Russian news agency. Named Bad Rabbit, it’s a newer version of NotPetya and is suspected to have come from North Korea. As ransomware goes, Bad […]

Would You Let a Stranger Watch Your Children?

Thursday, October 26th, 2017

If you’re a parent, then you know how important choosing a babysitter is. Even though we usually just trust a neighbor and relative to do it, we are handing over the safety of our children to another person, and what’s more important than that? Money certainly isn’t, but protecting the company that employs you and […]

Another Hyatt Hack

Friday, October 20th, 2017

Once again, Hyatt hotels are having to alert customers of another credit card breach at some of their hotels. According to Hyatt Corp., their in-house cybersecurity team discovered that some payment card information had been accessed without authorization. The affected cards were either manually entered or swiped at the front desk of Hyatt-managed hotels between […]

KRACK WPA2 Vulnerability

Friday, October 20th, 2017

Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the WPA2 protocol leaving implementations open to attack. Being called Key Reinstallation Attack,  or KRACK, it works by exploiting a weakness within the protocol, putting virtually all implementations of WPA2 at risk. So far it has been discovered to affect Windows, Apple, Android, Linux, Mediatek, and Linksys, among […]

Cary, NC Company Fined for Vermont Health Data Breach

Wednesday, October 18th, 2017

Vermont attorney general TJ Donovan has announced he will fine the Cary, North Carolina-based company SAManage USA Inc. $264,000 as part of a settlement agreement with the data management company stemming from a breach involving the state’s Healthcare Insurance Exchange. The Social Security numbers of 660 users of Health Connect, Vermont’s healthcare exchange, were exposed […]

North Korea Hacks Military

Wednesday, October 18th, 2017

According to a member of South Korea’s ruling party, North Korean hackers have stolen 235 gigabytes of information from the country’s Ministry of National Defense. Of all the information stolen, about 80% of it is still unidentified, despite North Korean officials denying the breach happened at all. Lost in the hack was South Korea’s response […]

Amazon Web Services Leak

Tuesday, October 17th, 2017

150,000 people in the US have been affected by the leak of an Amazon S3 repository exposing patient information. The breach in a server containing 47.5 gigabytes worth of data belonging to Patient Home Monitoring Corp was discovered by Kromtech Security Researchers. Information, including patient and doctor names, case management notes, and other personal information was […]

14,005 Reasons to Make Sure the Elderly in Your Life Are Cyber Secure

Monday, October 16th, 2017

Medicaid has been in the news a while back thanks to the GOP’s response to Obamacare, but Medicaid’s sibling Medicare was also in the news. You may have missed it, but the 14,005 people who were affected could tell you all about the Brand New Day breach. Brand New Day is a Medicare-approved producer of […]

Equifax Website Serving Malware

Friday, October 13th, 2017

Some (but not all) visitors to the Equifax website were being redirected to a website with a malware warning that prompted them to download and install Adware.Eorezo via a program called MediaDownloaderIron.exe, which is labeled as malware by a number of antivirus providers. Initial fears were that Equifax had been hacked again, but Equifax released […]

North Korea Tried to Spearphish US Power

Wednesday, October 11th, 2017

A number of people employed at US power companies recently received invitations to a charity event via an email with an invitation file attached. It was, as you’ve probably guessed, not actually an invitation to an event to help people, but something with quite the opposite intent. Anybody who downloaded and opened the attachment would […]

Don’t Pull Out the Knife After You’ve Been Hacked

Wednesday, October 11th, 2017

If you’ve seen any action movies, then you’ve seen it before. The hero is stabbed or impaled and left for dead by the bad guy, but somehow, they gather enough will to live to pull out whatever is inside them and save the day. That’s the movie version. In real life though, when someone is […]

Former Equifax CEO: Blame the IT Guy

Thursday, October 5th, 2017

You’re most likely aware of the Equifax data breach, and if you’re not you should be since odds are one in two that you were affected by it. In the aftermath, CEO Richard Smith stepped down, but he hasn’t been out of the spotlight. Smith has been spending time in Washington lately, taking abuse from […]

Mercedes-Benz Shut Down by WannaCry Ransomware?

Thursday, October 5th, 2017

Though no official announcement has been made and it allegedly took place last week, rumors have surfaced that several Mercedes-Benz production plants were hit with the infamous WannaCry ransomware. The original article this comes from cites a number of unnamed sources who say that Mercedez-Benz plants in Bremen, Hamburg, and Untertürkheim were infected badly enough […]

New HIPAA Czar Says Small Providers Will Not Get Off Easy

Thursday, October 5th, 2017

The OCR has a new enforcement czar, Roger Severino, and he’s out for blood. The chief of the agency that enforces HIPAA told the audience of the 10th annual “Safeguarding Health Information” HIPAA conference that his top priority will be to find a “big, juicy, egregious” breach case to use as an example from which […]

EVERY Yahoo Account was Hacked

Wednesday, October 4th, 2017

Do you remember the Yahoo hack from a while back? At first the company reported that about 200 million Yahoo accounts had been compromised. They later changed that to one billion hacked Yahoo accounts. Now they’re admitting that the real number was, well, all of them, a total of about three billion Yahoo accounts hacked. […]

What the CIA and 17-Year-Olds Have in Common

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2017

If we told you that there was a hacking tool called “Ricky Bobby” and that the people who made and used it were quoted saying, “you know we got the dankest Trojans and collection tools,” you would assume that they were hackers working out of their parents’ basement right? Unfortunately, you would be wrong, because […]