Once More Unto The Breach. The Data Breach, That Is.
Global data breach news from Israel, South Africa, the UN, and more. This Week in Fraud Trends, February 14, 2020.
We’ve been enjoying steering clear of data breach stories for a minute or two, but this week, there were just too many new tales to ignore. Data breach news was especially global this week, as we had stories about data breaches impacting Israel …
“The breach is believed to have compromised information such as names, addresses, polling stations, and ID numbers of the Israeli citizens who are eligible to vote. It is also possible that the phone numbers, gender, and if they were Likud voters. The breach was exposed because of faulty security in the app created by Feedback for the Likud Party called Elector.”
… causing concern in South Africa …
“Nedbank is warning clients of a potential breach on a third-party service provider’s IT system which could have exposed clients’ details, including names, ID number, telephone numbers and addresses.”
… and even wreaking havoc at the UN:
“The attacks targeted three UN offices, two in Geneva and one in Vienna, that have a total of around 4,000 staff members. The UN Office at Geneva received the most damage, with 33 of its servers compromised. The hackers also got into at least seven servers between the other two locations.”
Not to mention Long Island City, New York:
“The breach occurred in November when an “unauthorized third party” used email phishing to gain access to the email account credentials of employees, said Lisa Anselmo, a spokeswoman for Altice. The stolen credentials were used to remotely access and download the contents of mailboxes.”
If you’re wondering, at this point, just how serious these incidents really are, and whether or not the hacked organizations really suffer in any meaningful ways, we have some stories for you on that front as well. For example, we learned this week that the Equifax breach has cost the company a rather staggering amount to date:
“Equifax said its 2019 costs included $292.1 million for technology and data security, $41.3 million for legal and investigative fees and $3.9 million for product liability.”
Fortunately, the Equifax news wasn’t all bad this week; as reported by TechCrunch, charges have been filed against four hackers charged with being behind the attacks:
“U.S. prosecutors have charged four Chinese military hackers over the 2017 cyberattack at Equifax, which resulted in a data breach involving more than 147 million credit reports. The nine-charge indictment was announced Monday against Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei. The Justice Department said the four work for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The hackers are said to be part of the APT10 group, a notorious Beijing-backed hacking group that was previously blamed for hacking into dozens of major U.S. companies and government systems, including HPE, IBM and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”
The United States Department of Justice has certainly had a headline-worthy week (All 4 federal prosecutors quit Stone case after DOJ overrules prosecutors on sentencing request) and they were busy on the fraud front as well, and not just in their dealings with Equifax hackers. As reported by Compliance Week, “the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled a fresh round of allegations Thursday against Chinese tech giant Huawei, including racketeering, theft of trade secrets, and bank fraud.”
If, after reading all the above, you find that your interest in positive news about the future of digital security is increasing rapidly, then you are encouraged to read the following new article from PYMNTS:
DataVisor Co-Founder & CEO Yinglian Xie offers some vital insights throughout, including this observation:
“We need to start taking specific measurements to detect what good users look like — which sounds counterintuitive, because we always think first about detecting the bad guys, but I want to broaden the scope of real-time account monitoring and start understanding the customer over the course of their lifecycle.”
We’ll close things out there, in order to end on a good note! Which means we’ve now made it to …
The Tweet of the Week!
We chose this one for it’s rather humorous approach to advocating for better security practices:
And with that, we bid you a safe, secure, and prosperous week!
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Additional reading:
