Health Quest announced that it's begun notifying patients whose information might have been exposed in a phishing incident. According to its website notice, Health Quest first learned of the incident in July 2018 when several employees fell for a phishing attack and thereby inadvertently disclosed...

A new survey found that regulators have thus far imposed $126 million worth of fines for data breaches and other GDPR infringements. According to DLA Piper's GDPR Data Breach Survey, data protection regulators imposed €114 million (about US$126 million / £97 million) in GDPR-related fines between May 25, 2018 and January 27, 2020. The international...

With the 2010s now over, the infosec industry is now fully invested in 2020 and beyond. The 2020s will no doubt present their fair share of challenging digital security threats. But they will also enable security professionals to discuss shared difficulties at conferences and summits. To help promote these collaborative events, we at The State of...

The NIS Directive is the first EU horizontal legislation addressing cybersecurity challenges. It is a true game-changer for cybersecurity resilience and cooperation in Europe. As we noted in a previous blog post, the Directive has three main objectives: Improving national cybersecurity capabilities Building cooperation at EU level Promoting a...

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that they have seized the domain name for weleakinfo.com. On January 16, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia announced that the FBI and DOJ had executed a warrant to seize the domain of weleakinfo.com in cooperation with law enforcement...

Canadian online pharmacy PlanetDrugsDirect.com has contacted customers warning them that their data might have been exposed in what they euphemistically describe as a "data security incident". In an email seen by Bleeping Computer, the website warned that exposed personal data could include the following: Customer names Postal addresses Email...

Security researchers observed that Ako ransomware is using malicious spam attachments to go after organizations' networks. On January 14, AppRiver Senior Cybersecurity Analyst David Pickett contacted Bleeping Computer and told the computer self-help site that his company had observed Ako being distributed via spam email. Using subject lines such as ...

The cloud has changed how we use and consume IT services. Where data resides along with how it is transferred, stored and processed has fundamentally changed and with-it new risk management challenges. Let's talk about some of those challenges. First and foremost, the cat is out of the bag. We're not going back to the data center, and any resistance...

The ISA/IEC 62443 series of standards, developed by the ISA99 committee and adopted by the International Electrotechnical Commission, provides a flexible framework to address and mitigate current and future security vulnerabilities in industrial automation and control systems. These standards not only address configuration weaknesses to harden...

The Emotet trojan recently leveraged a phishing campaign to target email addresses associated with users at the United Nations. In an email provided by Cofense to Bleeping Computer, Emotet's handlers pretended to be representatives of Norway to the United Nations (UN). They used this disguise to conduct a phishing campaign with "highly specific...

One sunny morning, my breakfast was interrupted by a phone call from a friend who is an entrepreneur engaged in the transportation of various goods. He said that $11,000 disappeared from his bank account during the night. The bank support service could not help. They advised my friend to report this incident to the police. The money transfers were...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s January 2020 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-866 on Wednesday, January 15th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2020-0601 While there are no in-the-wild and disclosed CVEs in the January patch drop, there is a lot of discussion around...

The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is urging people to no longer use computers with Windows 7 installed for banking or email. A spokesperson for the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a part of GCHQ, encouraged consumers to upgrade their Windows 7 devices. As quoted in a report by Telegraph:We would urge those using the software...

In a previous post, I wrote about my key take-aways from Verizon’s 2019 Payment Security Report. While it's no surprise it was full of interesting and useful data, (Verizon’s yearly Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) has become required reading.) I was delighted to find an excellent guide on the the 9-5-4 model, a means by which an organization...

A school district in Texas announced that it lost approximately $2.3 million after falling victim to a phishing email scam. On January 10, the Manor Independent School District (MISD) published a statement on Twitter and Facebook in which it revealed that it was investigating a phishing email scam that cost it $2.3 million. https://twitter.com...

On January 7th, MITRE released ATT&CK for Industrial Control Systems, a taxonomy of real-world cyber adversarial behavior targeting ICS or industrial control systems. These systems operate critical infrastructure in manufacturing and utility industries, and they are popular targets in financial and espionage motivated attacks. Recent high-profile...

The UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) fined DSG Retail Limited £500,000 following a malware attack that affected millions of the retailer's customers. As the result of an investigation, the ICO learned that the DSG Retail Limited had suffered a security incident in which an attacker installed malware on 5,390 tills at Currys PC World and...

A British man has been jailed for two years after police caught him using a notorious Remote Access Trojan (RAT) to hijack the webcams of young women, and spy upon them. 27-year-old Scott Cowley, of St Helens, Merseyside, was arrested last November as part of an international investigation into purchasers of the Imminent Monitor RAT. Imminent...