Petronella Cybersecurity News

In a rare public warning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have issued a report that says since at least May sophisticated hackers have been attacking multiple energy and industrial firms. While the report warned hackers had compromise some networks, it did not get into the specifics of who […]

If you sell cars, then you know a car’s safety is one of the most important features to customers. That’s why the recent Wikileaks “Vault7” leak is a thorn in the side for all auto dealers, but there’s some recent good news that could help you ensure customers that the smart cars you sell won’t […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]