Items tagged with data-breach
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Equifax was hacked surfaced and 143 million Americans have potentially had their personal information stolen. What many have been wondering is what exactly do the hackers plan to do with all that stolen data. A report making the rounds claims that the hackers want a massive ransom from Equifax to return the data. Hackers made the ransom demand on an unnamed Darkweb site stating that they would delete the data if they receive a ransom payment of 600 BTC, which would be worth about $2.6 million at current valuation. The value of Bitcoin is at one of its highest points ever right now, having jumped past $4,000 for the first time in mid-August...
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My phone just pinged. Did someone just like the Instagram photo of my dog? Is my Chipotle to-go order finally ready? Nope, I was one of the lucky one billion users whose Yahoo account was infiltrated by hackers, my personal information potentially compromised. This past November law enforcement provided Yahoo with files that a third party claimed was Yahoo user data. Yahoo then hired an outside forensics team, and established that the data did in fact belong to their users. According to Yahoo, “Based on further analysis of this data by the forensic experts, we believe an unauthorized third party, in August 2013, stole data associated with a broader set of user accounts…” That "broader set" of...
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In case you hadn’t heard, data breaches are a problem--a huge problem--and to quantify that somewhat, New York AG Eric Schneiderman released a report detailing his state’s data breach information including the costs involved. There’s a lot of meaty data in the report, but one part that stands out is that there were 900 data breaches in New York in 2013 exposing the personal details of 7.3 million people at a cost of $1.37 billion. Woof. Those numbers were driven in large part by the massive Target breach as well as those of Sony and Living Social, and they point to the fact that hacking is the leading problem. The report shows that hacks were responsible for 40.78% (2,009) of...
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Symantec, which has been making antivirus products for decades (including Norton, the first piece of software most people would try to remove from a new PC), is getting out of the antivirus game, sort of. Brian Dye, Symantec's senior vice president for information security, told the Wall Street Journal that in Synamtec’s view, antivirus is dead. "We don't think of antivirus as a moneymaker in any way," he stated. That doesn't mean the company is completely abandoning Norton, but it is heading in a new direction. Basically, instead of primarily focusing on keeping the walls secure, Symantec is more interested in what to do when (not if) cybercriminals break through. In a year, this will...
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The good news for Target and its customers is that the retailer’s robust IT system detected the massive holiday season hack that affected tens of millions of accounts before it ever happened. The bad news is that Target failed to act on that detection, and the rest is history. According to Bloomberg, Target’s security tools detected the malware used in the hack as early as November 30th, and the thieves weren’t able to remove any data until December 2nd, which means that there were a couple of days wherein the threat couild have been mitigated. Bloomberg asserts that it was human error that led to the hack from there: Once the malware was flagged, the alert was forwarded to...
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The fallout from the massive holiday Target data breach persists, as the retailer works feverishly to sort out exactly what happened and what to do about it. The 40 million or so customers who used cards at Target between November 27th and December 15th and had their data accessed by cybercrooks still need to be wary of any fraudulent activity, but there’s at least a shred of good news: your PIN numbers are safe. According to the most recent update from Target, PIN numbers are encrypted at the keypad with Triple DES encryption, and the company can’t decrypt them because the keys don’t exist in Target’s system. Rather, a third-party external payment processor handles all...
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