Entries Tagged "data breaches"

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Australia Increases Fines for Massive Data Breaches

After suffering two large, and embarrassing, data breaches in recent weeks, the Australian government increased the fine for serious data breaches from $2.2 million to a minimum of $50 million. (That’s $50 million AUD, or $32 million USD.)

This is a welcome change. The problem is one of incentives, and Australia has now increased the incentive for companies to secure the personal data or their users and customers.

EDITED TO ADD (10/15): I got the details wrong. One, this is a proposed increase. Two, the amount of $50 million AUD is only applicable in very few cases.

Posted on October 26, 2022 at 6:13 AM • View Comments

Massive Data Breach at Uber

It’s big:

The breach appeared to have compromised many of Uber’s internal systems, and a person claiming responsibility for the hack sent images of email, cloud storage and code repositories to cybersecurity researchers and The New York Times.

“They pretty much have full access to Uber,” said Sam Curry, a security engineer at Yuga Labs who corresponded with the person who claimed to be responsible for the breach. “This is a total compromise, from what it looks like.”

It looks like a pretty basic phishing attack; someone gave the hacker their login credentials. And because Uber has lousy internal security, lots of people have access to everything. So once a hacker gains a foothold, they have access to everything.

This is the same thing that Mudge accuses Twitter of: too many employees have broad access within the company’s network.

More details. Slashdot thread.

EDITED TO ADD (9/20): More details.

Posted on September 16, 2022 at 9:07 AM • View Comments

Signal Phone Numbers Exposed in Twilio Hack

Twilio was hacked earlier this month, and the phone numbers of 1,900 Signal users were exposed:

Here’s what our users need to know:

  • All users can rest assured that their message history, contact lists, profile information, whom they’d blocked, and other personal data remain private and secure and were not affected.
  • For about 1,900 users, an attacker could have attempted to re-register their number to another device or learned that their number was registered to Signal. This attack has since been shut down by Twilio. 1,900 users is a very small percentage of Signal’s total users, meaning that most were not affected.

We are notifying these 1,900 users directly, and prompting them to re-register Signal on their devices.

If you were not notified, don’t worry about it. But it does bring up the old question: Why does Signal require a phone number to use? It doesn’t have to be that way.

Posted on August 23, 2022 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

Syniverse Hack

This is interesting:

A company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for years, impacting more than 200 of its clients and potentially millions of cellphone users worldwide.

I’ve never heard of the company.

No details about the hack. It could be nothing. It could be a national intelligence service looking for information.

Posted on October 6, 2021 at 9:19 AM • View Comments

Finnish Data Theft and Extortion

The Finnish psychotherapy clinic Vastaamo was the victim of a data breach and theft. The criminals tried extorting money from the clinic. When that failed, they started extorting money from the patients:

Neither the company nor Finnish investigators have released many details about the nature of the breach, but reports say the attackers initially sought a payment of about 450,000 euros to protect about 40,000 patient records. The company reportedly did not pay up. Given the scale of the attack and the sensitive nature of the stolen data, the case has become a national story in Finland. Globally, attacks on health care organizations have escalated as cybercriminals look for higher-value targets.

[…]

Vastaamo said customers and employees had “personally been victims of extortion” in the case. Reports say that on Oct. 21 and Oct. 22, the cybercriminals began posting batches of about 100 patient records on the dark web and allowing people to pay about 500 euros to have their information taken down.

Posted on December 10, 2020 at 1:48 PM • View Comments

Congressional Report on the 2017 Equifax Data Breach

The US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has just released a comprehensive report on the 2017 Equifax hack. It’s a great piece of writing, with a detailed timeline, root cause analysis, and lessons learned. Lance Spitzner also commented on this.

Here is my testimony before before the House Subcommittee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection last November.

Posted on December 19, 2018 at 6:00 AM • View Comments

Your Personal Data is Already Stolen

In an excellent blog post, Brian Krebs makes clear something I have been saying for a while:

Likewise for individuals, it pays to accept two unfortunate and harsh realities:

Reality #1: Bad guys already have access to personal data points that you may believe should be secret but which nevertheless aren’t, including your credit card information, Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, date of birth, address, previous addresses, phone number, and yes ­ even your credit file.

Reality #2: Any data point you share with a company will in all likelihood eventually be hacked, lost, leaked, stolen or sold ­ usually through no fault of your own. And if you’re an American, it means (at least for the time being) your recourse to do anything about that when it does happen is limited or nil.

[…]

Once you’ve owned both of these realities, you realize that expecting another company to safeguard your security is a fool’s errand, and that it makes far more sense to focus instead on doing everything you can to proactively prevent identity thieves, malicious hackers or other ne’er-do-wells from abusing access to said data.

His advice is good.

Posted on December 6, 2018 at 7:33 AM • View Comments

Deloitte Hacked

The large accountancy firm Deloitte was hacked, losing client e-mails and files. The hackers had access inside the company’s networks for months. Deloitte is doing its best to downplay the severity of this hack, but Brian Krebs reports that the hack “involves the compromise of all administrator accounts at the company as well as Deloitte’s entire internal email system.”

So far, the hackers haven’t published all the data they stole.

Posted on September 29, 2017 at 6:13 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.