SANS Institute suffers data breach due to phishing attack
SANS Institute, a provider of cybersecurity training and certification services, lost approximately 28,000 items of personally identifiable information (PII) in a data breach that occurred after a single staff member fell victim to a phishing attack.
According to a notification from SANS Institute, on August 6th, as part of a systematic review of email configuration and rules, the organization identified a suspicious forwarding rule and initiated their incident response process. "This rule was found to have forwarded a number of emails from a specific individual's e-mail account to a suspicious external email address. The forwarded emails included files that contained some subset of email, first name, last name, work title, company name, industry, address, and country of residence. SANS quickly stopped any further release of information from the account," says the SANS Institute.