The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced in a press release this week that Anthem, Inc. (Anthem), one of the nation’s largest health benefit companies, has agreed to pay $16 million and take substantial corrective action to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules. This settlement
security
When was the last time you looked at RDP access?
By Jon Washburn on
A presentation at Black Hat recently revealed that the creators of the “SamSam” ransomware have netted over $6M to date, attacking mostly medium-to-large public and private sector organizations. And they’re showing no signs of slowing down.
In the most recent SamSam attacks, the attackers concentrated their efforts on brute-force hacking of weak passwords on devices…
New threat targeting old medical imaging equipment
By Jon Washburn on
Health care providers and suppliers should be wary of the “Orangeworm” threat, an implementation of malware out in the wild that’s gathering information off of compromised medical equipment, especially old systems where file shares and Windows XP are still in use:
While this group seems to be limiting their actions to reconnaissance and compromising…
List of Pending 2018 Breach Legislation
By Jon Washburn on
Posted in Data Breach, Laws / Regulations
While we have yet to see much in the way of major changes (or punishment) following the massive Equifax data breach last year, there are many changes being introduced at the state level with regard to breach notification, penalties, whether or not credit reporting agencies can charge you for freezing your credit, and consumer rights…
How does your leadership remain aware of cyber security threats?
By Jon Washburn on
Some notable stats showed up in the recently-released 2017 Veracode State of Software Security report: while “nearly a third (29 percent) of survey respondents indicated that they are actively pursuing digital transformation projects [and] … a further 29 percent stated that they are either planning for or considering digital transformation projects for the future,”…
Funds transfer fraud in real estate transactions has seen an explosive increase this year
By Jon Washburn & Tamara Boeck on
As a firm with a large real estate practice, we are keenly aware of the risks of wire transfer fraud in real estate transactions – which has exploded from a reported $19 Million in 2016 to almost $1 Billion in 2017.
Often this fraud is the result of the hacker compromising a legitimate email…
Big Data is amazingly useful … and risky
By Jon Washburn on
Per the Freedom of Information Act, US citizens have the right to access information from the federal government. We can visit Data.gov to search the more than 197,000 current datasets currently indexed on the site. While the intent is to leverage that data for the public good, there’s also an enormous amount of information …
You may be subscribing to US-CERT … but have you heard of ICS-CERT?
By Jon Washburn on
Posted in Industrial Control Systems, Security
The United States Computer Emergency Readiness team (US-CERT) operates within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), protecting America by responding to major incidents, analyzing threats, and exchanging critical cyber security information with trusted partners around the world. You may have already signed up for the popular email alert…
Encryption vulnerability in WiFi Protected Access II (WPA2)
By Jon Washburn on
WPA2 is the “secure” implementation option used by the vast majority of enterprise WiFi systems – other protocols have their own security issues, which is why everyone moved to WPA2. Unfortunately, researches have found a way to break that security.
The good news is, for most attacks the attacker has to be on the…
If a security researcher leaves you a voicemail, please call them back …
By Jon Washburn on
A good lesson for technology providers: if security researchers reach out to you, acknowledge them as quickly as possible, especially when they’ve discovered a critical vulnerability. If you work with them to remediate the issue, you may be able to get a patch out before they feel the need to publish the vulnerability for the …