Compromise, Compromises, Wow, Summer has brought a lot of security headaches!
Well, the entire August and the beginning of September have been very busy for the security community!
A hacking ring had pilfered 1.2 billion user name and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses. What should you do?
1. Change your passwords.
2. Try a secure password manager
3. Enable two-factor authentication
Second, mid-August, a Hospital network was hacked, 4.5 million records stolen
Community Health Systems, which operates 206 hospitals across the United States, announced on Monday that hackers recently broke into its computers and stole data on 4.5 million patients. Hackers have gained access to their names, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, birthdays and telephone numbers.
If you were one of the victims, the hospital would have notified you by now…
Third, near end of August, FBI investigating Russian links to JPMorgan hacking
Community Health Systems, which operates 206 hospitals across the United States, announced on Monday that hackers recently broke into its computers and stole data on 4.5 million patients. Hackers have gained access to their names, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, birthdays and telephone numbers.
If you were one of the victims, the hospital would have notified you by now…
Last, just over the Labor day weekend holiday, stolen private celebrity pictures that were stored on Apple’s iCloud service were all over the news… due to some vulnerability in the iCloud backup process, not because iCloud was compromised.
What should you do? Stop looking for those pictures! They have not been Photoshoped yet and they’re legally considered stolen goods. Your email and password are as much protection as almost any service on earth offers you by default — and once a hacker obtains those you’re probably in trouble in any case. However, Apple’s two-factor solution is actually incomplete. It does not cover many other iCloud services, including backups.
Well let’s hope that the rest of September continues uneventful, we already have enough in our hands…
///*** Forget about uneventful! This just came in yesterday: *** ///
Home Depot Data Breach Could Be the Largest Yet! It could top 60 million credit cards, since the vulnerability started being exploited since April 2014—5 FULL months!
Home Depot is in trouble here, so they will offer free identity protection and credit-monitoring services to any customer who had used a credit or debit card at any of its affected stores.
The bad news was caused by Home Depot being hacked by the same Windows XPe (embedded) vulnerability like Target, and by yet another Eastern Europe group…
Time to move to a different non-MS platform for retail Points of Sale (POS) systems?