Data Security

Maintaining workplace safety can seem like a rare form of torture--videos and quizzes and talks and such. For most of us, it's a necessary chore. But despite the looks among employees with each new H.R. training session, the work that happens in those conference rooms at least in theory translates to profits. The inoculation process of onboarding a new hire is profoundly important to...

U.S. mailing services company Pitney-Bowes experienced services outages after a ransomware attack earlier this week. “It has been confirmed that our systems have been affected by a malware attack that encrypted information on some systems and disrupted client access to our services. Our technical and operational teams are making progress to restore the affected systems. At this time, the company...

The FBI is warning businesses about a new series of cyberattacks that can circumvent multi-factor authentication (MFA). In a Private Industry Notification (PIN), the FBI warned businesses that “cyber actors” had been observed, “circumventing multi-factor authentication through common social engineering and technical attacks.” The report went on to describe several scenarios where hackers bypassed MFA protections, accessing target networks and...

The hacker allegedly behind the Collection #1 and Collection #2 data breaches has claimed responsibility for the compromise of more than 200 million users of a popular iOS and Android gaming app. Online cybersecurity site the Hacker News reported earlier this week that Pakistani hacker Gnosticplayers had gained access to the player database of Zynga’s Scrabble clone called Words with...

Fifty attorneys general announced earlier this month that Google is the target of an antitrust probe. Any business owner who has happened to find themselves stuck in the company's orbit--that would be any company with a digital presence--won't hesitate to tell you such a move is long overdue. Case in point: I just did a Google search for Basecamp, an online project management tool....

A federal appellate court ruled that mining and aggregating user data publicly posted to social media sites is allowable by law. In an opinion released earlier this month, the 9th Circuit U.S.Court of Appeals upheld an injunction against employment-centric social network LinkedIn from blocking access to hiQ, a data mining company that sells aggregated user information.  LinkedIn sent a cease-and-desist letter...

When Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's account was hacked for roughly 20 minutes, we all got a glimpse of corporate identity theft, and why it matters. While the takeover was by no means a major cyberevent (and the account was quickly recovered), the fact remained that the CEO of a major company lost control of his account on a service...

In the second episode of Third Certainty, Adam Levin explains how consumers can protect themselves in the aftermath of the Capital One data breach.

A misconfigured database has exposed the personal data of nearly every Ecuadorean citizen, including 6.7 million children. The database was discovered by vpnMentor and was traced back to Ecuadorean company Novaestra. It contained 20.8 million records, well over the country’s current population of 16 million. The data included official government ID numbers, phone numbers, family records, birthdates, death dates (where...

Since 1993, hackers have traveled to Las Vegas from around the world to demonstrate their skills at DefCon’s annual convention, and every year new horrors of cyber-insecurity are revealed as they wield their craft. Last year, for example, an eleven-year-old boy changed the election results on a replica of the Florida state election website in under ten minutes. This year was no...