Archive for 2017

Restaurants Easy Targets for Credit Card Fraud

Thursday, March 23rd, 2017

Google algorithms helped identify the source of a massive credit card breach – for the second time in just nine months, with its big “This site may be hacked” warning. And oddly enough, the source of both breaches?  Restaurants chains. Restaurants use Point of Sale (POS) terminals in their businesses to help track items such […]

Cybersecurity Firm Newest Phishing Victim

Thursday, March 23rd, 2017

You think only “regular” citizens can fall victim to tax phishing scams?  Think again. Last Thursday, George McKenzie, the CEO of VA-based cybersecurity firm Defense Point Security, LLC, informed its employees that all of their W-2 information was compromised after a fellow co-worker was ensnared in a hacker’s phishing “net.”  This data included such personal […]

Stolen Secret Service Laptop

Thursday, March 23rd, 2017

A perpetrator, whose identity is still unknown (despite being caught on surveillance tapes), nabbed a Secret Service agent’s agency-issued laptop from the agent’s vehicle on Thursday in New York City, as well as an official Secret Service lapel pin.   While the laptop itself did not contain sensitive information, if the thief also happens to […]

Threat to 300 Million iPhone Users

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2017

A hacker group called the Turkish Crime Family is demanding $75,000 in cyrptocurrency or $100,000 in iTunes gift cards from Apple.  They claim to have access to 300 million iCloud accounts and say they’ll wipe all those accounts clean if Apple doesn’t pony up. A screenshot of a conversation between the hacker group and the […]

The One Click that Brought Down Yahoo

Tuesday, March 21st, 2017

One click.  One and a half billion users.  Five hundred million dollars.  Those are roughly the numbers involved in sordid story of Yahoo’s sale to Verizon. As you probably already know, Verizon has been working on buying Yahoo, but a hacking scandal that compromised a mindblowing number of user accounts allowed Verizon to get a […]

FBI and IRS Alert: W2 Phishing Scams

Tuesday, March 21st, 2017

Tax season is upon us, but procrastinators and tax consultants aren’t the only people who are busy this time of year.  More and more, this is a busy season for criminals who want to cash in on your tax return. An increasingly popular technique is to spoof a CEO’s email to steal a company’s employee’s […]

What Does Minecraft Have to Do with State Hackers?

Monday, March 20th, 2017

Let’s face it, state-sponsored hackers are scary. They have the knowledge and resources wreak havoc on governments and individual citizens alike. Take the Dyn DDoS hack that happened last fall. Dyn is an internet performance management company that provides internet infrastructure, so when they were hit by a large DDoS attack that shut down their […]

Hackers Charged in Yahoo Breach

Thursday, March 16th, 2017

The theft of half a billion Yahoo user accounts has been well-documented.  Not only has it affected users, it’s also caused problems with Yahoo’s attempted buyout to Verizon.  Some scoffed when Yahoo mentioned being hacked by state-sponsored hackers, but now it appears there’s some validity to that claim.  The US Justice Department revealed an indictment […]

The Five W’s of the WikiLeaks CIA Dump

Wednesday, March 15th, 2017

Who: WikiLeaks is a self-proclaimed “stateless news organization” that is led by Julian Assange.  The website became infamous in June 2013 when Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor, leaked secret NSA surveillance documents proving that the government agency does in fact illegally monitor its citizens. It is believed that the person who leaked the CIA files […]

Cloud Vulnerabilities Revealed in Amazon Outage

Wednesday, March 15th, 2017

On Tuesday, February 28, 2017, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage System (S3) – a service used by hundreds of thousands of websites – went down and stayed down for most of the day.   Unfortunately, the outage impacted millions of people, including Nest “smart” thermostat users, who were unable to manage or receive alerts […]

Verizon Wants Big Yahoo Discount

Tuesday, March 14th, 2017

Poor Yahoo.  Once an internet giant, there is an ongoing attempt to sell it off to Verizon, but the search engine and news outlet continues to get dinged by reports of massive data theft from various hacks. Verizon is still interested in the purchase, but according to a SEC filing, they are looking to get […]

UK Fears Political Cyberattacks from Russia

Tuesday, March 14th, 2017

Russia is suspected of having interfered in the recent presidential election in the United States.  Russia is also suspected of influencing politics in France and Germany.  The UK recently sent a warning to its own political parties warning of potential Russian interference. Ciaran Martin is the chief executive of the Government Communications HeadquartersCyber Security Centre […]

The Iceberg That Could Sink Your Cloud Service Product

Monday, March 13th, 2017

There was an American soldier fighting in WWII. He busted the heel of one of his boots so he took them to the Army shoe repair and dropped them off. But soldiers tend to be busy people, so he forgot to pick them up. 4 years later, he was cleaning out his closet and found […]

An Answer to Ransomware?

Wednesday, March 8th, 2017

The IEEE and the PCHA will co-host a daylong event at HIMSS17 based on the future of Blockchain in the healthcare industry. Chances are you don’t know what that sentence meant, but you need to keep reading to find out because it could have major implications for your future. Ransomware may have been the bane […]

North Carolina Patient Information Exposed

Monday, March 6th, 2017

The information of almost 13,000 North Carolina Medicaid patients was exposed in an unencrypted email last year. The email, which was sent by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services on November 30, contained the information of 12,731 Medicaid patients who are in assisted living homes.  The information included names, locations and Medicaid […]

What the Top Ten Most Popular Passwords of 2016 Say About Us

Monday, March 6th, 2017

We have all been there before. You’re in a hurry and need to pull an attachment from an email. You log on to a computer and go to your email provider, but the password you put in doesn’t work. You try a few different variations, but still nothing. You try to reset your password out […]

Why Cybercriminals Attack Law Firms

Monday, March 6th, 2017

Last December, Chinese hackers tried to breach the computer systems at several big law firms including Cravath Swaine & Moore and Weil, Gotshal & Manges looking for data to exploit insider trading deals, according to the The Wall Street Journal.The alleged attackers attempted and succeeded in accessing data over 100,000 times and were never detected. […]

Did Obama Hand Russia a Parting Gift?

Thursday, March 2nd, 2017

When Donald Trump took office on January 20th, Barack Obama’s presidency was officially over and the country moved on, in very different direction. Will Obama’s legacy be defined by the Affordable Care Act? The Iran nuclear deal? The new openness between Cuba and America? If you asked most Americans right now they might tell you […]

Linux Kernel Bug

Wednesday, March 1st, 2017

After a smaller one was discovered in January, security researcher Andrey Konovalov recently uncovered an even larger privilege-escalation Linux Kernel bug that dates back to over a decade ago in the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) by applying Syzkaller which is a Google kernel fuzzing tool. This use-after-free bug (CVE-2017-6074) impacts such major Linux OS […]

That’s Not a Font, That’s a Virus!

Wednesday, March 1st, 2017

NeoSmart Technologies, an internet security firm, recently identified a new and very effective cyber scam that has been targeting Google Chrome users by prompting them to update their Chrome Font Pack, but… HoeflerText is not a real font – It’s actually malware in font clothing. Hackers have apparently encoded JavaScript into a poorly secured WordPress […]