A coding mistake by an electronic health records vendor has resulted in a data breach impacting thousands of United Kingdom patients. But the incident also serves as a reminder to healthcare entities in the U.S. and elsewhere about the variety of data privacy and security risks vendors can pose.
Google says it closely vets third-party party applications that peek into Gmail boxes. But an investigation by the Wall Street Journal raises questions if consumers are fully aware of the consequences of granting access to third-party apps and the practices of email-scanning companies.
If 2017 was the year of ransomware innovation, 2018 is well on its way to being known as the year of cryptocurrency mining malware. Numerous studies have found that the most seen malware attacks today are designed for cryptojacking. But while ransomware campaigns may be down, they're far from out.
Police recently arrested the suspected administrators and top users of the stresser/booter service Webstresser.org. Unfortunately, the plethora of such services means the world is unlikely to see a reduction in DDoS attack volumes, says Darren Anstee of Arbor Networks.
With endpoint security, the fundamental concept was always to detect and prevent. Mature security strategies today are increasingly looking at response and remediation as well to complete the cycle, says Shrenik Bhayani of Kaspersky Lab.
To have any hope of keeping up "with the exponential rise in variants in malware," organizations must reduce their attack surface, in part by using technology designed to learn what attacks look like and respond as quickly as possible, says Cylance's Anton Grashion.
Companies are sending notification emails about a data breach at Typeform, a software-as-a-service platform for distributing and managing surveys, questionnaires and competitions. The breach is so far known to affect Travelodge, Fortnum & Mason, Monzo bank and the Tasmanian Electoral Commission.
Businesses undertaking digital transformation - typically involving a push to the cloud, amongst other initiatives - must put security first if they want their project to achieve optimum success, says Fortinet's Patrick Grillo.
Open source software components may be free, but that doesn't automatically make them safe to use. "There can be risks involved," says Steve Giguere, of Synopsys, who says these risks are often compounded by the pressure to deliver goods to market quickly and with new features.
The difficulty in hiring new information security personnel and need to combat the ever-rising number of threats is driving many organizations to seek increased incident response automation, and in many cases to get it by working with managed security service providers, says AlienVault's Mike LaPeters.
As organizations move more data into the cloud, too many are treating security as an afterthought, says Outpost24's Bob Egner. Instead, as part of an agile development program, he recommends making penetration testing a constant, and using solid DevSecOps to maintain optimal cloud data security.
Much more must be done to shore up the U.K.'s national infrastructure. "It's partly austerity, and it's partly what's happening in the global economy, but we've really seen an underinvestment, specifically in the critical national infrastructure," says LogRhythm's Ross Brewer.
Security experts warn that hackers could one day make use of machine learning and AI to make their attacks more effective. Thankfully, says Cybereason's Ross Rustici, that doesn't appear to have happened yet, although network-penetration attacks are getting more automated than ever.
Facebook has responded to more than 2,000 questions posed by U.S. Senate and House committees with 747 pages of answers, which reveal that Facebook was still been providing special access to user data to dozens of companies, six months after it says it had stopped doing so in 2015.
Old technology never dies, but rather fades "very slowly" away, as evidenced by there being 21 million FTP servers still in use, says Rapid7's Tod Beardsley. Rapid7's scans of the internet have also revealed a worrying number of internet-exposed databases, memcached servers and poorly secured VoIP devices.
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