Archive for 2017

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 […]

What’s Happening with the Equifax Data Breach?

Friday, September 29th, 2017

The Equifax data breach has been a disaster, but you don’t seem to be hearing as much about it right now. So what’s the latest? One big piece of news you might have heard over the last week is that Richard Smith, Equifax’s CEO, has decided to retire, with the president of Equifax’s Asia-Pacific division taking […]

Cyberthreat Closes Schools

Wednesday, September 27th, 2017

We can go to the public with much of what we have. We can with great ease, put everything we have retrieved, from your district, on full display and cause you a tremendous amount of public embarrassment and humiliation. What does that mean, you ask? Imagine if we published all of your sensitive behavioural reports […]

Deloitte Hacked

Monday, September 25th, 2017

Deloitte, one of the largest accounting firms in the world, announced a data breach that they say didn’t have much of an impact, most seem to think they’re downplaying the incident. According to Deloitte, only six of their clients had their data stolen. They say they were able to research the hack and determine that […]

Are Law Firms the New Healthcare of Cybercrime?

Monday, September 25th, 2017

If you told someone a secret, and they went along telling people your secret would you tell them another secret? Of course not. If you told someone a secret and they accidentally told people your secret, would you tell them another? What if the secrets were insider information that could be why millions of dollars […]

Another 20 Million Hit with Another Locky Variant

Wednesday, September 20th, 2017

A staggering 20 million systems were hit with Locky, a popular strain of ransomware malware, in a single day. The attack is being pretty smart. It determines the language used on the computer and sends an email in that language. Vietnam has been hit the hardest, along with Colombia, Greece, India, and Turkey. Parts of […]

Backdoor on 200,000 Websites

Monday, September 18th, 2017

WordPress is a hugely popular website platform. One of the things that makes it popular is the number of free plugins that can easily add advanced features and functionality to sites. One of those plugins was designed to act as a backdoor to the estimated 200,000 websites using it. The plugin in question is called […]