More and more, the news is filled with stories about how personal information is being used to benefit others. From revelations after Mark Zuckerberg’s pseudo mea culpa in front of Congress last month, to stories about fake news, identity theft, and how data mining is being used by political campaigns to understand the demographics and psychographics of potential voters, these Little Brothers are collecting massive amounts of personal data – all with our tacit consent.
Whenever there’s a data breach, it’s easy to get caught up in the root cause analysis – a misconfigured device, an unpatched application, an employee falling for a phishing attack, you name it. But really, the root causes of most breaches are not these moment-in-time errors. Instead, they are almost always shortsighted decisions made well before the breach ever occurs.
Forty-one percent of investors and analysts are now extremely concerned about cyber threats, ranking it as the largest threat to business, according to the PwC Global Investor Survey 2018.
Atlanta city employees coming to work this morning were handed an unusual notice: don’t turn on your computers. The municipal systems had been hit with a ransomware attack on Thursday, and employees were not to use their computer until they were cleared by the municipal IT group.
In today’s world, the Internet of Things (IoT) is ubiquitous and holds great potential, but also brings security concerns. While IoT devices are being used across industries, the healthcare industry’s experiences with insecure devices provide valuable lessons to heed.
2017 illustrated a significantly lower barrier-of-entry to the world of cybercrime with the emergence of malware-as-a-service, with user profile names and credit card numbers readily available on the Dark Web and distribution of 20,000 messages for just $40.
As ransomware continues to gain notoriety, cybercriminals are looking for more ways to get the most out of the malware that they develop. Similarly, other bad actors who may lack the necessary skills to develop malware themselves are looking for a way to get in on the action. This has led to an increase in ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), a practice in which cybercriminals put their ransomware up for sale, where it is purchased and leveraged by other criminals who are technically unable to develop their own variants.
With dozens of breaches and millions left violated, 2017 has witnessed a historic amount of hacking. This year has been stained with numerous hacking incidents, including WannaCry, Petya and Cloudbleed. Of these many cases, the Equifax data breach can be crowned the most significant hack of the year, having exposed the personal data of nearly 148 million people.
