Petronella Cybersecurity News

June saw the most patient data breaches for 2016 so far, with over 11 million patient accounts compromised, according to a new report.  Over ten million of them came from one single breach. Hackers are not the sole cause of all the data breaches, though they caused a significant portion at just over 40%.  The same […]

A new strain of ransomware has surfaced that is targeting hospitals. Being called “Crysis”, this new malware not only encrypts a hospital’s files, it then uploads that data to the hackers’ servers. As you can imagine, this has hospitals less concerned about if they should pay the ransom, but the HIPAA nightmare this creates. This […]

In the great schism that is the 2016 election year, bi-partisan participation may seem like a thing of the past, but believe it or not, it is not quite dead just yet. A letter sent by Congressmen Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Will Hurd (R-Texas) this week not only praised Deputy Director for Health Information Privacy […]

The biggest threat in the United States when it comes to property crime is identity theft. It surpasses all other property crimes combined with a total of over $10 billion dollars in losses. With that in mind here are five easy steps that will help you protect your identity. Use silly answers for security questions. […]

When purchasing online software programs, it is important to do your research. Case in point? The now defunct commercial keylog developers at hawkeyeproducts.com. Rodel Mendrez, a researcher for Trustwave, became suspicious of the company after catching a poorly-constructed email in his spam trappers. Cached copies revealed a website offering superior keystroke monitoring, that also had […]

We have warned before about Android malware that mimics the user interface of apps like Facebook, Uber, and WhatsApp in order to steal victim’s personal information. Now there are reports of a new Trojan virus that attacks Android devices that was earning the hackers behind it $500,000 a day. In the first half of this […]

By now, you are probably aware that ransomware started running rampant this year. No computer is safe. And now, neither is your smartphone. A report released yesterday by Kaspersky Lab shows that they detected and protected around 35,000 Android users around the world from attempted ransomware attacks between April 2014 to March 2015. The same […]

“Massachusetts General Hospital is deeply committed to the security and confidentiality of our patients’ information, including any such information maintained by our third-party vendors.”  That’s the apology issued by Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston following a data breach that netted a hacker 4,300 patient records. The data thief accessed the files through a third party […]

At the time of this writing, one hacker claims to have stolen information from three healthcare databases totaling up to around 655,000 patient records.  The information includes full names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, mailing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, race, gender and insurance account info. All of this information is now for sale […]

By hijacking mobile phone accounts, identity thieves have found a new and easy way to make money. This new technique is a form of money laundering, because the thieves take over the mobile account so that they can order equipment like news phones to your account, then turn around and sell them. According to the […]

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, right? Sometimes, the answer is just no, as is the case with Intel remaining relevant in the personal computer security industry. As you may or may not remember back in the 1990’s, Intel had control of the almost completely useless antiviral, LanDesk Virus Protect. This antiviral […]

If you have been following this blog, you know that hospitals have become a major target of cybercriminals this year. But why? What is it about the healthcare industry that makes it so attractive to hackers? Vulnerability. Healthcare facilities need their equipment to be available, which makes them less secure. They were designed with patients […]

As our blog’s history shows, the healthcare industry has become an increasingly popular ransomware target for cybercriminals. With this rise in attacks comes a new industry: Cyber Ransom Liability Insurance. Ransomware attacks began to rise earlier this year, so they are not covered under most standard insurance policies. When choosing a policy, it is important for […]

It was recently reported that credit card skimmers were being found at Walmart stores. Now we have video of skimmers that have been designed to fit invisibly inside an ATM card slot. Unlike old skimmers that were comparatively bulky, these new designs are incredibly thin and slide in over the magnetic strip reader. These new skimmers are impossible […]

With the tragic events that unfolded in Orlando at the Pulse nightclub, a lot of questions about LGBT safety, gun control, and terrorism are being asked. And rightly so. Unfortunately, what has been lost in the tragedy is how HIPAA laws are used and how even those within the medical community often lack proper education […]

Over 100 weaknesses have been found in the Pentagon’s networks and websites.  Fortunately, these hackers were paid to find them. 1400 hackers took part in Hack the Pentagon, a program created by the Department of Defense.  Their goal was to use whitehat hackers to probe for weaknesses with rewards of up to $15,000 for security […]

There have been new revelations about the US government’s spy program thanks to a series of Edward Snowden’s emails to the NSA’s SIGINT Oversight and Compliance Division released due to a Freedom of Information Act request. We’ve warned people time and again how macros embedded within Word documents are a prime attack vector of hackers, […]

This year has seen a massive increase in Ransomware, and with that increase comes increasingly hefty ransoms. Savvy businesses worldwide have begun to stockpile Bitcoins, just to be on the safe side. One UK study, conducted by Citrix and Censuswide, which polled 250 IT managers, showed that a third of those companies have begun to […]

Law enforcement in Russia have carried out the largest ever arrest of hackers in the country after rounding up 50 people that were allegedly responsible for stealing more than $25 million from Russian financial institutions. Russia’s Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service (FSB) carried out raids across the country that seized computer equipment, financial documents, […]

Unfortunately for Dropbox, last week several identity theft protection services including LifeLock wrongly reported that 73 million usernames and passwords had been stolen in a data breach on the cloud storage company. The problem is that Dropbox didn’t have a data breach, Tumblr did. The source of the mistake was the identity monitoring firm CSID. […]