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Security News for the Week Ending January 17, 2020

Orphaned Data in the Cloud Researchers at security firm vpnMentor found an unsecured S3 bucket with passport, tax forms, background checks, job applications and other sensitive data for thousands of employees of British consultancies.  Many of the firms involved are no longer in business. The researchers reported this to Amazon and the UK’s Computer Emergency […]

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Telcos Not Doing Good at Preventing SIM Swap Attacks

A SIM is the (usually) hardware card that gives your phone its “personality”.  The SIM is tied to the carrier and contains all the information that the phone needs to talk to your carrier. As users SLOOOOWLY migrate to using text messages as an extra layer of authentication for logging in to a variety of […]

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Phishing Campaign Takes Different Tactic With Similar Outcome

When phishers attack users, they typically try to steal your credentials – your userid and password.  If you are one of the small percentage of users that religiously use two factor authentication (Google says that 90% of GMail users do not use two factor authentication), these password thefts do not help a hacker unless they […]

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Cloud Hopper Attack Bigger Than Reported. MUCH Bigger

I hate to keep beating on this drum, but the message is important and the news keeps getting worse. Yesterday I wrote about yet another managed service provider that was hit by a ransomware attack and a number of their clients had their data encrypted. Today the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Cloud […]

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More Businesses Are Opting to Pay Ransom to Get Their Data Back

The 2019 Crowdstrike Global Security Attitude Survey said that the total number of organizations around the world paying the ransom after falling victim to a supply chain attack almost tripled from 14% to 39%. In the UK, the number of organizations that have experienced a ransomware attack and then paid the ransom doubled from 14% […]

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VISA SAYS: Ongoing Cyber Attacks at Gas Pumps

Visa published an alert that says that point of sale (PoS) system of North American Fuel Dispenser Merchants (as in gas stations and the folks that make the systems that allow you to “pay at the pump”) are being targeted in credit card skimming attacks. The attack is ongoing, increasing and coordinated – by cybercrime […]

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