Security Awareness Training Blog

Data Breach Blog

Technical reporting and analysis on high-profile data breaches, how they happened, and how hackers are using the information mined from breaches.

Consumer Privacy: California Follows in the Footsteps of GDPR

The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (AB 375) takes effect on January 1, 2020 and will be the most exacting data privacy policy in the United States. Similar to the European ...
Continue Reading

Equifax: "Oh, minor detail, we also lost 17.6 Million driver's licenses in that data breach"...

On May 7, executives of Equifax submitted a "statement for the record" to the Securities and Exchange Commission detailing the extent of the consumer data breach the company first ...
Continue Reading

Yahoo Pays $35 Million Penalty For The Hot Mess Of Their Massive Data Breach

This is the first time that a public company gets fined by regulators for failure to properly investigate their 2014 data breach, and disclose it to shareholders. Technically this is not ...
Continue Reading

Cancer Center Discloses $2.3 Million Data Breach Settlement In Their Bankruptcy Filing

As reported in BNA Privacy Law Watch, on December 6, 2017, health care provider 21st Century Oncology agreed to pay $2.3 million to settle charges by the Department of Health and Human ...
Continue Reading

Uber Total Loss: 57 Million Records Stolen But Data Breach Was Hidden For A Year

Oh boy. Uber is known for pushing the limits of the law and has dozens of lawsuits pending against it, but this one went too far and now comes the reckoning. Bloomberg was first to report ...
Continue Reading

Whole Foods Point Of Sale Data Breach. Did Amazon Buy An Organic Lemon?

Uh Oh. They just announced. Generally it's the tip of the iceberg, and then over time more details are released that show it was muuuch worse than initially expected. Looks like Amazon ...
Continue Reading

Large Insurance Company Settles for $5.5 Million over "Failed To Patch" Data Breach

A large insurance company (Nationwide) agreed to pay a total of $5.5 Million to settle charges brought by 32 states resulting from the loss of critical consumer information attributable ...
Continue Reading

Data Breaches Are Up 29 Percent Over Last Year

Data breaches are running 29 percent above last year, according to a report released by the Identity Theft Resource Center and CyberScout. Hacking was the leading cause of data breaches ...
Continue Reading

Cleveland Medical Associates Ransomware Infection Caused 22K-Record Databreach - How To Prevent This

Cleveland Medical Associates is offering about 22,000 patients identity protection services after a ransomware attack against the practice. The practice is offering a year of protective ...
Continue Reading

Urgent Phishing Alert: Warn Your Users Against AdultFriendFinder Scams Now

Your end-users may have seen this in the news yesterday, or will read about it today. A massive data breach of the adult dating and entertainment company Friend Finder Network has exposed ...
Continue Reading

Scam Of The Week: FBI Warns Against Data Breach Extortion

The number of data breaches keeps going up. Last week it was more than 1,000 Wendy's where credit card records got ripped off. Fraudsters quickly use the news release of a high-profile ...
Continue Reading

Scam Of The Week: LinkedIn Email Change Your Password

You probably remember the 2012 LinkedIn data breach. It was a big deal because something like 6.5 million user account passwords were posted online, but LinkedIn never confirmed the final ...
Continue Reading

What Is The #1 Cause Of Healthcare Data Breaches?

As a new story about hospital ransomware or a stolen laptop containing PHI seemingly emerges every day, it comes as no surprise that healthcare data breaches have steadily increased in ...
Continue Reading

Ransomware Attack Shuts Down Medstar Washington Hospital

The Washington Post reported that a ransomware infection penetrated the computer network of MedStar Health early Monday morning, forcing the Washington health care behemoth to shut down ...
Continue Reading

What is the REAL cost of a data breach?

A new survey done by Kaspersky with participation of 5,500 companies in 26 countries finally shows the real cost of a data breach broken out by Small and Medium Business (SMB) and ...
Continue Reading

Half Of Your Users Are Now Spear Phishing Targets

In a presentation at the Intelligence & National Security Summit, Bill Evanina, Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) announced "There have been just ...
Continue Reading

Stop The AshMad Insanity!

First a 10Gig dump with the full Ashley Madison database. Then a 20Gig dump with their whole Github repository, and then to top it all off a 300G(!) dump. In an interview with Motherboard ...
Continue Reading

Phishing Alert: Warn Your Users Against Ashley Madison Scams Now

Your end-users saw this in the news yesterday, or will read about it today. The hackers who stole more than 36 million records from the Ashley Madison site (which makes it easy to cheat ...
Continue Reading

SHOCKER: Data Breaches Cost Big Companies Very Little

Two articles today in Fortune Magazine and Harvard Business Review each lifted a piece of the veil about a dirty little secret about data breaches. From Home Depot to Target to Sony, big ...
Continue Reading

Data Breach at Health Insurer Anthem 80 million records

Last updated Feb 7, 2015 - Both the Wall Street Journal and cyber security blogger Brian Krebs reported that Anthem Inc., the nation’s second largest health insurer disclosed that hackers ...
Continue Reading

Get the latest about social engineering

Subscribe to CyberheistNews