Security News for the Week Ending July 19, 2019
FTC Approves $5 Billion Fine for Facebook
The FTC commissioners reportedly approved an approximately $5 billion fine of Facebook for violating the 2011 consent decree in conjunction with the Cambridge Analytica mess.
To put that in perspective, Facebook’s revenue just for 4th quarter of last year was $16.9 billion and their profit for that quarter was $6.9 billion, so the fine represents a little less than one quarter’s profit. Still this is two orders of magnitude greater than the FTC fine of Google a few years ago. The Justice Department has to approve the settlement and is typically a rubber stamp, but given this President’s relationship with social media, you never know. Source: NY Times.
Why do they Want to Hack ME?
The Trickbot malware has compromised 250 million email addresses according to Techcrunch. Besides using your email account to send spam, it does lots of other nifty stuff as it evolves. Nice piece of work – NOT!
Why? So that they can use your email to send spam. After you, you are kind of a trusted person, so that if someone gets an email from you as opposed to a spammer, they are more likely to click on the link inside or open the attachment and voila, they are owned.
And, of course, you are blamed, which is even better for the spammer. Source: Techcrunch.
Firefox Following Chrome – Marking HTTP web sites with “NOT SECURE” Label
Firefox is following in the footsteps of Google’s Chrome. Starting this fall Firefox will also mark all HTTP pages (as opposed to HTTPS) as NOT SECURE as Google already does. Hopefully this will encourage web site operators to install security certificates. It used to be expensive, but now there are free options. Source: ZDNet.
AMCA Breach Adds Another 2 Million + Victims
Even though American Medical Collection Agency was forced into bankruptcy as a result of the already 20 million+ victims, the hits keep coming for AMCA. Another one of their customers, Clinical Pathology Labs, said that more than 2 million of their customers were affected by the breach. They claim that they didn’t get enough information from AMCA to figure out what happened.
It is going to be interesting to see where the lawsuits go, who’s name(s) show up on the HIPAA wall of shame and who Health and Human Services goes after. Given that AMCA filed for bankruptcy, it is very likely that Quest, CPL and AMCA’s other customers will wind up being sued. Actually, Quest, Labcorp and the others are who should be sued because they selected AMCA as a vendor and obviously did not perform adequate due diligence. Source: Techcrunch.
Another Day, Another Cryptocurrency Hack/Breach
This time it is the cryptocurrency exchange Bitpoint and they say that half of their 110,000 customers lost (virtual) money as a result of a hack last week. The hack cost Bitpoint $28 million and they say that they plan the refund their customer’s money. One more time the hackers compromised the software, not the encryption, Source: The Next Web.
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