Warning: everything you thought you knew about corporate cybersecurity is about to change.
That’s according to Paul Paget, the CEO of Pwnie Express, a Boston-based startup that makes software and hardware for detecting unauthorized devices in the vicinity of a corporate network.
With the RSA Conference starting later this month, we thought it would be useful to determine which of the thousands of exhibitors at the annual cybersecurity event have the most momentum going into the show.
We scraped the exhibitor page on the event website and used our company upload tool to put it through the CB Insights database, which found matches for 300+ companies. We then used our Mosaic algorithm, which tracks the health of private companies, to rank the 10 companies that you should be talking to at the conference.
Twitter has revealed that last week there was a “bug” in its password recovery system which could have potentially exposed the email address and phone numbers of a “small number” of users. The company place this number at around less than 10,000 active accounts and all have been notified today: “If you weren’t notified, you weren’t affected,” wrote Michael Coates, Twitter’s trust and info security officer.
The president of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center said on Wednesday that his hospital paid hackers a ransom of $17,000 in bitcoins to regain control of their computer systems after a cyber attack.
Allen Stefanek said in a statement that paying the ransom was the “quickest and most efficient way” of regaining access to the affected systems, which were crippled on Feb. 5 and interfered with hospital staff’s ability to communicate electronically.
Stefanek said there was no evidence that any patient or employee information was accessed in the so-called malware attack, and that the hospital fully restored access to its electronic medical record system this Monday.
“Patient care has not been compromised in any way,” Stefanek said.
Malicious software that uses encryption to hold data for ransom has become wildly successful over the last few years. Ransomware, as it is known, now looks to have scored its highest-profile victim yet.
Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles was infected by ransomware more than a week ago. The software locked up files throughout the hospital’s IT system and, according to unconfirmed reports, demanded 9,000 bitcoins, more than $3 million, for their return.
Complejos sistemas de armas como buques de guerra o aviones de combate son cada vez más vulnerables a los errores informáticos; máxime cuando emplean versiones de sistemas operativos obsoletos.
cyber-hacker working for Iran hacked the computer of a former IDF chief-of-staff, an Israeli television report said Tuesday, and gained access to the unnamed army chief’s entire computer database.
The hacker was named by Channel 10 as Yaser Balaghi. He was said to have subsequently bragged about the hack, but he also inadvertently left behind a means to trace his identity. That error prompted Iran to halt the hacking operation, which targeted 1,800 people worldwide, including Israeli army generals, human rights activists in the Persian Gulf and scientists.
To PayPal, the transactions signal fraud: a U.S. user’s account is accessed in the U.K., China, and elsewhere around the world. But PayPal’s security system—thanks to a growing reliance on an artificial-intelligence technology known as deep learning—is now able to spot possible fraud without making mistakes. That’s because algorithms mine data from the customer’s purchasing history—in addition to reviewing patterns of likely fraud stored in its databases—and can tell whether, for example, the suspect transactions were innocent actions of a globe-hopping pilot.
An independent computer security researcher uncovered a database of information on 191 million voters that is exposed on the open Internet due to an incorrectly configured database, he said on Monday.
The database includes names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, phone numbers and emails of voters in all 50 U.S. states and Washington, researcher Chris Vickery said in a phone interview.
Vickery, a tech support specialist from Austin, Texas, said he found the information while looking for information exposed on the Web in a bid to raise awareness of data leaks.
Vickery said he could not tell whether others had accessed the voter database, which took about a day to download.
More connected devices are connecting with more databases and sharing more information than ever – and we’re just at the beginning of the data-gathering revolution that the Internet of Things will bring us. Unfortunately, according to security experts, Kaspersky Lab, that provides hackers with more opportunities to steal more data, especially from IoT devices that are essentially unprotected.
“The bond of trust between users and their devices can lead them to forget about security,” said Victor Yablokov, head of mobile product line at Kaspersky Lab.
