IBM's 2023 installment of their annual "Cost of a Breach" report has thrown up some interesting trends. Of course, breaches being costly is no longer news at this stage! What’s interesting is the difference in how organizations respond to threats and which technologies are helping reduce the costs associated with every IT team’s nightmare scenario.
The average cost of a breach rose once again
Risk and financial advisory solutions provider Kroll on Friday disclosed that one of its employees fell victim to a "highly sophisticated" SIM swapping attack.
The incident, which took place on August 19, 2023, targeted the employee's T-Mobile account, the company said.
"Specifically, T-Mobile, without any authority from or contact with Kroll or its employee, transferred that employee's phone
Two U.K. teenagers have been convicted by a jury in London for being part of the notorious LAPSUS$ (aka Slippy Spider) transnational gang and for orchestrating a series of brazen, high-profile hacks against major tech firms and demanding a ransom in exchange for not leaking the stolen information.
This includes Arion Kurtaj (aka White, Breachbase, WhiteDoxbin, and TeaPotUberHacker), an 18-
The U.K. Electoral Commission on Tuesday disclosed a "complex" cyber attack on its systems that went undetected for over a year, allowing the threat actors to access years worth of voter data belonging to 40 million people.
"The incident was identified in October 2022 after suspicious activity was detected on our systems," the regulator said. "It became clear that hostile actors had first
A hacktivist group known as Mysterious Team Bangladesh has been linked to over 750 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and 78 website defacements since June 2022.
"The group most frequently attacks logistics, government, and financial sector organizations in India and Israel," Singapore-headquartered cybersecurity firm Group-IB said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The group is
Cybersecurity agencies in Australia and the U.S. have published a joint cybersecurity advisory warning against security flaws in web applications that could be exploited by malicious actors to orchestrate data breach incidents and steal confidential data.
This includes a specific class of bugs called Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR), a type of access control flaw that occurs when an
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday approved new rules that require publicly traded companies to publicize details of a cyber attack within four days of identifying that it has a "material" impact on their finances, marking a major shift in how computer breaches are disclosed.
"Whether a company loses a factory in a fire — or millions of files in a cybersecurity
The healthcare industry is under a constant barrage of cyberattacks. It has traditionally been one of the most frequently targeted industries, and things haven’t changed in 2023. The U.S. Government’s Office for Civil Rights reported 145 data breaches in the United States during the first quarter of this year. That follows 707 incidents a year ago, during which over 50 million records were
Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, the owner of the now-defunct BreachForums website, has pleaded guilty to charges related to his operation of the cybercrime forum as well as having child pornography images.
The development, first reported by DataBreaches.net last week, comes nearly four months after Fitzpatrick (aka pompompurin) was formally charged in the U.S. with conspiracy to commit access device
A little over a week after JumpCloud reset API keys of customers impacted by a security incident, the company said the intrusion was the work of a sophisticated nation-state actor.
The adversary "gained unauthorized access to our systems to target a small and specific set of our customers," Bob Phan, chief information security officer (CISO) at JumpCloud, said in a post-mortem report. "The
JumpCloud, a provider of cloud-based identity and access management solutions, has swiftly reacted to an ongoing cybersecurity incident that impacted some of its clients.
As part of its damage control efforts, JumpCloud has reset the application programming interface (API) keys of all customers affected by this event, aiming to protect their valuable data.
The company has informed the concerned
A few weeks ago, the 32nd edition of RSA, one of the world's largest cybersecurity conferences, wrapped up in San Francisco. Among the highlights, Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant at Google Cloud, presented a retrospective on the state of cybersecurity. During his keynote, Mandia stated:
"There are clear steps organizations can take beyond common safeguards and security tools to strengthen their
The threat actors behind the ransomware attack on Taiwanese PC maker MSI last month have leaked the company's private code signing keys on their dark website.
"Confirmed, Intel OEM private key leaked, causing an impact on the entire ecosystem," Alex Matrosov, founder and CEO of firmware security firm Binarly, said in a tweet over the weekend.
"It appears that Intel Boot Guard may not be
Digital storage giant Western Digital confirmed that an "unauthorized third party" gained access to its systems and stole personal information belonging to the company's online store customers.
"This information included customer names, billing and shipping addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers," the San Jose-based company said in a disclosure last week.
"In addition, the database
Open source media player software provider Kodi has confirmed a data breach after threat actors stole the company's MyBB forum database containing user data and private messages.
What's more, the unknown threat actors attempted to sell the data dump comprising 400,635 Kodi users on the now-defunct BreachForums cybercrime marketplace.
"MyBB admin logs show the account of a trusted but currently
A joint international law enforcement operation has dismantled Genesis Market, an illegal online marketplace that specialized in the sale of stolen credentials associated with email, bank accounts, and social media platforms.
Coinciding with the infrastructure seizure, the major crackdown, which involved authorities from 17 countries, culminated in 119 arrests and 208 property searches in 13
Every year hundreds of millions of malware attacks occur worldwide, and every year businesses deal with the impact of viruses, worms, keyloggers, and ransomware. Malware is a pernicious threat and the biggest driver for businesses to look for cybersecurity solutions.
Naturally, businesses want to find products that will stop malware in its tracks, and so they search for solutions to do that.
Data storage devices maker Western Digital on Monday disclosed a "network security incident" that involved unauthorized access to its systems.
The breach is said to have occurred on March 26, 2023, enabling an unnamed third party to gain access to a "number of the company's systems."
Following the discovery of the hack, Western Digital said it has initiated incident response efforts and enlisted
Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, the 20-year-old founder and the administrator of the now-defunct BreachForums has been formally charged in the U.S. with conspiracy to commit access device fraud.
If proven guilty, Fitzpatrick, who went by the online moniker "pompompurin," faces a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison. He was arrested on March 15, 2023.
"Cybercrime victimizes and steals financial
OpenAI on Friday disclosed that a bug in the Redis open source library was responsible for the exposure of other users' personal information and chat titles in the upstart's ChatGPT service earlier this week.
The glitch, which came to light on March 20, 2023, enabled certain users to view brief descriptions of other users' conversations from the chat history sidebar, prompting the company to
2022 was the year when inflation hit world economies, except in one corner of the global marketplace – stolen data. Ransomware payments fell by over 40% in 2022 compared to 2021. More organisations chose not to pay ransom demands, according to findings by blockchain firm Chainalysis.
Nonetheless, stolen data has value beyond a price tag, and in risky ways you may not expect. Evaluating stolen
U.S. law enforcement authorities have arrested a 21-year-old New York man in connection with running the infamous BreachForums hacking forum under the online alias "Pompompurin."
The development, first reported by Bloomberg Law, comes after News 12 Westchester, earlier this week, said that federal investigators "spent hours inside and outside of a home in Peekskill."
"At one point, investigators
Multiple threat actors, including a nation-state group, exploited a critical three-year-old security flaw in Progress Telerik to break into an unnamed federal entity in the U.S.
The disclosure comes from a joint advisory issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC).
Phishing, the theft of users' credentials or sensitive data using social engineering, has been a significant threat since the early days of the internet – and continues to plague organizations today, accounting for more than 30% of all known breaches. And with the mass migration to remote working during the pandemic, hackers have ramped up their efforts to steal login credentials as they take
The massive breach at LastPass was the result of one of its engineers failing to update Plex on their home computer, in what's a sobering reminder of the dangers of failing to keep software up-to-date.
The embattled password management service last week revealed how unidentified actors leveraged information stolen from an earlier incident that took place prior to August 12, 2022, along with
LastPass, which in December 2022 disclosed a severe data breach that allowed threat actors to access encrypted password vaults, said it happened as a result of the same adversary launching a second attack on its systems.
The company said one of its DevOps engineers had their personal home computer hacked and infected with a keylogger as part of a sustained cyber attack that exfiltrated sensitive
The Dutch police announced the arrest of three individuals in connection with a "large-scale" criminal operation involving data theft, extortion, and money laundering.
The suspects include two 21-year-old men from Zandvoort and Rotterdam and an 18-year-old man without a permanent residence. The arrests were made on January 23, 2023.
It's estimated that the hackers stole personal data belonging
Popular cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase disclosed that it experienced a cybersecurity attack that targeted its employees.
The company said its "cyber controls prevented the attacker from gaining direct system access and prevented any loss of funds or compromise of customer information."
The incident, which took place on February 5, 2023, resulted in the exposure of a "limited amount of
Security teams typically have great visibility over most areas, for example, the corporate network, endpoints, servers, and cloud infrastructure. They use this visibility to enforce the necessary security and compliance requirements. However, this is not the case when it comes to sensitive data sitting in production or analytic databases, data warehouses or data lakes.
Security teams have to
Popular social news aggregation platform Reddit has disclosed that it was the victim of a security incident that enabled unidentified threat actors to gain unauthorized access to internal documents, code, and some unspecified business systems.
The company blamed it on a "sophisticated and highly-targeted phishing attack" that took place on February 5, 2023, aimed at its employees.
The attack
A Sydney man has been sentenced to an 18-month Community Correction Order (CCO) and 100 hours of community service for attempting to take advantage of the Optus data breach last year to blackmail its customers.
The unnamed individual, 19 when arrested in October 2022 and now 20, used the leaked records stolen from the security lapse to orchestrate an SMS-based extortion scheme.
The suspect
Over the past few years, cybersecurity has become a major concern for businesses around the globe. With the total cost of cybercrime in 2023 forecasted to reach $8 Trillion – with a T, not a B – it’s no wonder that cybersecurity is top of mind for leaders across all industries and regions.
However, despite growing attention and budgets for cybersecurity in recent years, attacks have only become
LastPass-owner GoTo (formerly LogMeIn) on Tuesday disclosed that unidentified threat actors were able to steal encrypted backups of some customers' data along with an encryption key for some of those backups in a November 2022 incident.
The breach, which targeted a third-party cloud storage service, impacted Central, Pro, join.me, Hamachi, and RemotelyAnywhere products, the company said.
"The
Popular email marketing and newsletter service Mailchimp has disclosed yet another security breach that enabled threat actors to access an internal support and account admin tool to obtain information about 133 customers.
"The unauthorized actor conducted a social engineering attack on Mailchimp employees and contractors, and obtained access to select Mailchimp accounts using employee
DevOps platform CircleCI on Friday disclosed that unidentified threat actors compromised an employee's laptop and leveraged malware to steal their two-factor authentication-backed credentials to breach the company's systems and data last month.
The CI/CD service CircleCI said the "sophisticated attack" took place on December 16, 2022, and that the malware went undetected by its antivirus
Twitter on Wednesday said that its investigation found "no evidence" that users' data sold online was obtained by exploiting any security vulnerabilities in its systems.
"Based on information and intel analyzed to investigate the issue, there is no evidence that the data being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems," the company said in a statement. "The data
The latest breach announced by LastPass is a major cause for concern to security stakeholders. As often occurs, we are at a security limbo – on the one hand, as LastPass has noted, users who followed LastPass best practices would be exposed to practically zero to extremely low risk. However, to say that password best practices are not followed is a wild understatement. The reality is that there
The August 2022 security breach of LastPass may have been more severe than previously disclosed by the company.
The popular password management service on Thursday revealed that malicious actors obtained a trove of personal information belonging to its customers that include their encrypted password vaults by using data siphoned from the earlier break-in.
Among the data stolen are "basic
Protecting customer data is critical for any business accepting online payment information. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), created by leading credit card companies, establishes best practices for protecting consumers' information. By adhering to these standards, businesses can ensure that their customer's personal and financial information is secure.
The PCI DSS
Medibank on Thursday confirmed that the threat actors behind the devastating cyber attack have posted another dump of data stolen from its systems on the dark web after its refusal to pay a ransom.
"We are in the process of analyzing the data, but the data released appears to be the data we believed the criminal stole," the Australian health insurer said.
"While our investigation continues there
Popular password management service LastPass said it's investigating a second security incident that involved attackers accessing some of its customer information.
"We recently detected unusual activity within a third-party cloud storage service, which is currently shared by both LastPass and its affiliate, GoTo," LastPass CEO Karim Toubba said.
GoTo, formerly called LogMeIn, acquired LastPass
The French data protection watchdog on Tuesday fined electricity provider Électricité de France (EDF) €600,000 for violating the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.
The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) said the electric utility breached European regulation by storing the passwords for over 25,800 accounts by hashing them using the
The Australian government has passed a bill that markedly increases the penalty for companies suffering from serious or repeated data breaches.
To that end, the maximum fines have been bumped up from the current AU$2.22 million to AU$50 million, 30% of an entity's adjusted turnover in the relevant period, or three times the value of any benefit obtained through the misuse of information,
Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has levied fines of €265 million ($277 million) against Meta Platforms for failing to safeguard the personal data of more than half a billion users of its Facebook service, ramping up privacy enforcement against U.S. tech firms.
The fines follow an inquiry initiated by the European regulator on April 14, 2021, close on the heels of a leak of a "collated
The Indian government on Friday released a draft version of the much-awaited data protection regulation, making it the fourth such effort since it was first proposed in July 2018.
The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022, as it's called, aims to secure personal data, while also seeking users' consent in what the draft claims is "clear and plain language" describing the exact kinds of
Australian health insurer Medibank today confirmed that personal data belonging to around 9.7 million of its current and former customers were accessed following a ransomware incident.
The attack, according to the company, was detected in its IT network on October 12 in a manner that it said was "consistent with the precursors to a ransomware event," prompting it to isolate its systems, but not
Communication services provider Twilio this week disclosed that it experienced another "brief security incident" in June 2022 perpetrated by the same threat actor behind the August hack that resulted in unauthorized access of customer information.
The security event occurred on June 29, 2022, the company said in an updated advisory shared this week, as part of its probe into the digital break-in
Australian health insurance firm Medibank on Wednesday disclosed that the personal information of all of its customers had been unauthorizedly accessed following a recent ransomware attack.
In an update to its ongoing investigation into the incident, the firm said the attackers had access to "significant amounts of health claims data" as well as personal data belonging to its ahm health
U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have published a joint advisory warning of attacks perpetrated by a cybercrime gang known as the Daixin Team primarily targeting the healthcare sector in the country.
"The Daixin Team is a ransomware and data extortion group that has targeted the HPH Sector with ransomware and data extortion operations since at least June 2022," the agencies said.
The
Microsoft this week confirmed that it inadvertently exposed information related to thousands of customers following a security lapse that left an endpoint publicly accessible over the internet sans any authentication.
"This misconfiguration resulted in the potential for unauthenticated access to some business transaction data corresponding to interactions between Microsoft and prospective
In April 2022, Omnicell reported a data breach affecting nearly 62,000 patients. The company has revealed that the incident has impacted an additional 64,000 individuals. This brings the total number of patients affected to over 126,000.
Will you be the next victim like Omnicell? If you are overlooking the importance of data protection, attackers can get you in no time.
Explore the impact of
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has arrested a 19-year-old teen from Sydney for allegedly attempting to leverage the data leaked following the Optus data breach late last month to extort victims.
The suspect is said to have carried out a text message blackmail scam, demanding that the recipients transfer $2,000 to a bank account or risk getting their personal information misused for
A U.S. federal court jury has found former Uber Chief Security Officer Joseph Sullivan guilty of not disclosing a 2016 breach of customer and driver records to regulators and attempting to cover up the incident.
Sullivan has been convicted on two counts: One for obstructing justice by not reporting the incident and another for misprision. He faces a maximum of five years in prison for the
Australia's largest telecommunications company Telstra disclosed that it was the victim of a data breach through a third-party, nearly two weeks after Optus reported a breach of its own.
"There has been no breach of Telstra's systems," Narelle Devine, the company's chief information security officer for the Asia Pacific region, said. "And no customer account data was involved."
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Australian telecom giant Optus on Monday confirmed that nearly 2.1 million of its current and former customers suffered a leak of their personal information and at least one form of identification number as a result of a data breach late last month.
The company also said it has engaged the services of Deloitte to conduct an external forensic assessment of the attack to "understand how it
Every year, billions of credentials appear online, be it on the dark web, clear web, paste sites, or in data dumps shared by cybercriminals. These credentials are often used for account takeover attacks, exposing organizations to breaches, ransomware, and data theft.
While CISOs are aware of growing identity threats and have multiple tools in their arsenal to help reduce the potential risk, the
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) on Monday disclosed it's working to gather "crucial evidence" and that it's collaborating with overseas law enforcement authorities following the hack of telecom provider Optus.
"Operation Hurricane has been launched to identify the criminals behind the alleged breach and to help shield Australians from identity fraud," the AFP said in a statement.
The
The City of London Police on Friday revealed that it has arrested a 17-year-old teenager from Oxfordshire on suspicion of hacking.
"On the evening of Thursday 22 September 2022, the City of London Police arrested a 17-year-old in Oxfordshire on suspicion of hacking," the agency said, adding "he remains in police custody."
The department said the arrest was made as part of an investigation in
American video game publisher Rockstar Games on Monday revealed it was a victim of a "network intrusion" that allowed an unauthorized party to illegally download early footage for the Grand Theft Auto VI.
"At this time, we do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services nor any long-term effect on the development of our ongoing projects," the company said in a notice shared on its
Uber, in an update, said there is "no evidence" that users' private information was compromised in a breach of its internal computer systems that was discovered late Thursday.
"We have no evidence that the incident involved access to sensitive user data (like trip history)," the company said. "All of our services including Uber, Uber Eats, Uber Freight, and the Uber Driver app are operational."