Data Breaches

The number of attacks targeting the government sector increased by 95% worldwide in the second half of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021, according to a new report by AI-based cybersecurity company CloudSek.  The increase in attacks can be attributed to rapid digitization and the shift to remote work during the pandemic, which broadened the attack surface of government entities and paved the way for an increase in cyberwarfare waged by nation-state actors,…

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The Irish Data Protection Commission announced Wednesday that it would fine Meta Ireland a total of $413 million for breaches of the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) related to the company’s handling of personal information on Facebook and Instagram. Under the GDPR, companies looking to process users’ personal information must do so under one of six identified legal bases, which include the consent of the user, necessity to the performance of a contract, and…

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Every business needs a secure way to collect, manage, and authenticate passwords. Unfortunately, no method is foolproof. Storing passwords in the browser and sending one-time access codes by SMS or authenticator apps can be bypassed by phishing. Password management products are more secure, but they have vulnerabilities as shown by the recent LastPass breach that exposed an encrypted backup of a database of saved passwords. For organizations with high security requirements, that leaves hardware-based login…

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Users who deployed the nightly builds of PyTorch between Christmas and New Year’s Eve likely received a rogue package as part of the installation that siphoned off sensitive data from their systems. The incident was the result of an attack called dependency confusion that continues to impact package managers and development environments if hardening steps are not taken. “If you installed PyTorch nightly on Linux via pip between December 25, 2022, and December 30, 2022,…

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LockBit, a prominent ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation, has apologized for an attack on the Toronto-based Hospital for Sick Children, also known as SickKids, and offered a free decryptor.  SickKids, a major pediatric teaching hospital, announced on December 19 that it had called a Code Grey system failure, as it was responding to a cybersecurity incident that was affecting several network systems at the hospital. The incident impacted some internal clinical and corporate systems, as well as…

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The ransomware ecosystem has changed significantly in 2022, with attackers shifting from large groups that dominated the landscape toward smaller ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operations in search of more flexibility and drawing less attention from law enforcement. This democratization of ransomware is bad news for organizations because it also brought in a diversification of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), more indicators of compromise (IOCs) to track, and potentially more hurdles to jump through when trying to negotiate…

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On December 23, the House and Senate Appropriations Committee agreed to a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill that funds government operations through the fiscal year 2023. On December 29, President Biden signed it. The 4,155-page bill reflects an already agreed-upon $858 billion for defense spending and an additional $800 billion for non-defense spending, including several prominent cybersecurity items. US Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), chair of the Subcommittee on Homeland Security, said, “This bill is a…

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The Log4Shell critical vulnerability that impacted millions of enterprise applications remains a common cause for security breaches a year after it received patches and widespread attention and is expected to remain a popular target for some time to come. Its long-lasting impact highlights the major risks posed by flaws in transitive software dependencies and the need for enterprises to urgently adopt software composition analysis and secure supply chain management practices Log4Shell, officially tracked as CVE-2021-44228,…

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On January 1, 2023, 20, the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) will go into effect. Approved by ballot measure as Proposition 24 in November 2020, it created a new consumer data privacy agency and put California another step ahead of other states in terms of privacy productions for consumers—and data security requirements for enterprises. California already had a privacy law in place, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), adopted in 2018. It went into effect in…

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