Petronella Cybersecurity News

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I hope you haven’t updated CCleaner in the last month or so. I know, I know, we’re always telling you to apply patches and updates as soon as you can, and that’s still solid advice. This is one exception. The problem is that an update for CCleaner that was available from August 15 through September […]

Most people like to think of hackers as vultures that pick money out of people’s pockets when they’re vulnerable. They’re vicious, ugly, and it’s easy to tell that they’re bad. That’s not how hackers work though, because they’re much smarter than that. Instead of simply stealing from people through brute force or picking off the […]

As if having the sensitive, personal information stolen from half of America wasn’t bad enough, and the way Equifax handled it, there’s more. Credit card companies have been telling banks and financial institutions that about 200,000 credit cards were also stolen in the process. Credit card companies often report information about fraudulent activity to the […]

Do you like using Kaspersky Antivirus, or any of their other cybersecurity software? If you work for the US government, you can wave bye-bye to it on any of your work computers, thanks for a ban from the Department of Homeland Security. We reported a few weeks ago that American intelligence agencies were afraid there […]

Microsoft recently released a bunch of patches to shore up security on 81 vulnerabilities, nearly half of which would allow hackers to execute commands on your computer. The patch fixes a wide variety of issues. The biggest one is a zero day exploit that has been actively used already. It allows a hacker to install […]