What the Hack? Podcast
What the Hack? Podcast
What the Hack? Podcast
What the Hack? Podcast

Data Security

The latest on data breaches and cybersecurity and data security by Adam K Levin.

phishing
A phishing campaign is targeting employees with phony email reminders for cybersecurity and phishing awareness training.  In a clever spin on more widely known phishing methods, hackers are sending emails pretending to be from KnowBe4, a company specializing in training employees to recognize phishing scams.  Source: Cofense.com The emails prompt their targets to click links to complete “required” training sessions,  which redirect...
Hartford ransomware
The city of Hartford, Connecticut’s capital, was hit by a ransomware attack that disrupted many of its critical systems and caused the city’s first day of school to be postponed. “We are often the subject of cyberattacks,” said Hartford mayor Luke Bronin. This was, however, the most extensive and significant attack that the city has been subject to in the...
With the average cost of a data breach exceeding three million dollars, cyber insurance has become a necessity for SMBs. Find out more on the latest episode of Third Certainty with Adam Levin.
NSA Wiretapping
The controversial collection of details on billions of American phone calls by the National Security Agency (NSA) was illegal and possibly unconstitutional, according to a ruling by a federal appeals court. Under the NSA program, information and metadata from calls placed by U.S. citizens were collected in bulk and screened for possible connections to terrorist activity. The program was initially...
Voter leak
Databases containing the personal information of millions of U.S. voters have appeared on Russian hacking forums. According to Russian news outlet Kommersant, a hacker called Gorka9 has posted the personal information of several million registered voters in Michigan, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, and South Carolina.The data includes names, birthdates, gender, mailing addresses, email addresses and polling station numbers. Cybersecurity researchers have...
Zoom outage
Zoom’s service outage on August 24 caused a ripple effect felt in schools and companies across the world. Students were unable to attend classes via remote learning, meetings were cancelled and for roughly three hours users were wondered if the now-ubiquitous platform had been brought down by hackers. Although the company later released an announcement attributing the outage to an...
Bridgefy
A messaging app popular with activists and protesters around the globe was found to have several major vulnerabilities that could compromise user privacy. Bridgefy is a mesh messaging app that lets users send and receive texts to others nearby without requiring an internet connection. While the developers of the app say it’s ideal for communicating during large gatherings, natural disasters,...
carnival data breach
Carnival Corporation, the largest cruise ship company in the world, announced that it had experienced a data breach following a ransomware attack on their systems. In an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company announced that it had “detected a ransomware attack that accessed and encrypted a portion of one brand’s information technology systems,” adding...
Unsubscribe links in the footers of unwanted emails present an ideal trap for hackers. In the latest episode of Third Certainty, Adam Levin explains how to deal with unwanted and unsolicited emails without compromising cybersecurity.
SANS institute
The SANS Institute, a company that provides cybersecurity training and certification, announced that a data breach compromised the personally identifiable data of roughly 28,000 records. The breach has been traced back to a phishing attack that targeted an employee of the company. Describing itself as “the most trusted and by far the largest source for information security training in the...