Cybersecurity News for the Week Ending May 14, 2021
If You Thought the FTC Was Toothless Before, Just Wait
I always complained that the FTC’s penalties were way too meek. Now I understand why, but it has just gotten MUCH worse. 99.99% of the blame goes to Congress. Initially, the FTC could not bring lawsuits against businesses at all. All they could do was to hold an administrative hearing. Then they could issue telling a business to stop doing bad things. In 1973 Congress added Section 13(b) to the FTC act, allowing the FTC to go to court and get an injunction – again no penalty for past bad deeds. In 1975 Congress added Section 19 which allows the FTC to seek monetary damages – after obtaining a cease and desist order and then only after future bad deeds which were obviously malicious, so still no relief. Last month the Supreme Court agreed that Congress, in its stupidity, did not grant the FTC any ability to make consumers whole for companies that break the law. Individually, a person can still sue the company – spending a lot money and years. Maybe they can convince some State AG to take up their case – maybe. If you can convince the Justice Department to go after some company, that is possible too, but all of those take years, maybe a decade with appeals. Congress intentionally neutered the FTC. This is the result. Will Congress act now? Your guess is as good as mine. Credit: ADCG
Apple is Privacy Focused – Except if it Hurts their Rep
Epic games and Apple are fighting in court and lawsuits tend to get dirty. In countering Apple’s argument that they didn’t want Epic to bypass their store because they want to protect their customers, Epic trotted out emails that Apple chose not to notify 128 million customers after a supply chain attack called XcodeGhost. This is the largest ever known attack against Apple products. They said notifying all those people would be hard and it would damage their reputation. They never did notify anyone. So much for being a privacy focused company.
The True Cost of Ransomware
Insurance giant CNA, which announced that it suffered a “sophisticated cyberattack” (what you and I call ransomware) in March. This week, two months later, they announced that all of the systems were back up and that yes, surprise, it was a ransomware attack. They said it took them two months to get back online because they had to restore each system, then scan and clean it and finally, harden it. This is the cost of ransomware. A lot of hard work and more importantly, months of time. If you do not have good backups, add to that the loss of data. And, as Colonial Pipeline learned this week, just because the hackers give you the decryption key, it doesn’t mean that the decryption process will be fast (they said that they were restoring from backups, even though they paid the $5 million in ransom) or that it will even work. Credit: Security Week
Global Chip Shortage Much Worse than Communicated
OUT OF STOCK! Expect to see more of that message.
In addition to phones, computers and laptops, expect to see those signs elsewhere such as appliances and kids toys. Already car makers are replacing cool tech like high tech entertainment consoles with radios. Probably with knobs and dials. Maybe that fancy auto-parking feature, well it is not available. Manufacturers are looking at which products are more popular or offer them higher margins and just not shipping some other models. Samsung is considering completely skipping the next generation of the super popular NOTE phones altogether. Expect the problem to continue into and through 2022. Credit: ZDNet
China has Collected Health Data of 80% of US Adults
China wants our data. Our health data is particularly useful because our population is very diverse. That makes us useful for them to test their software and systems on. Besides stealing that data, the are doing things like setting up Covid testing labs. What do you get with every sample? Our DNA. China wants to beat the US out of the biotech industry and stealing our data is helping them. Credit: The Hill
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