Data Breaches

Throughout her career in IT security, Irina Singh has thrived on difficult projects. With a bachelor of science degree in management of information systems and a minor in international business, she now manages a team of business information security liaisons serving four foundational business units at medical device company Medtronic. “One of my slogans is that we bring business to security and security to the business,” she says. Singh calls herself a business information security partner, but…

Read More

In a case that highlights how attackers can leverage information from data breaches to enhance their attacks, a group of attackers is using customer information stolen from a Colombian bank in phishing attacks with malicious documents, researchers report. The group, which might have been responsible for the data breach in the first place, is distributing an off-the-shelf Trojan program called ​​BitRAT that has been sold on the underground market since February 2021. Stolen data used…

Read More

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,…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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,…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More