The cost of a breach is on the rise. A recent report from IBM revealed that the average cost of a data breach had risen 12 percent over the past five years to $3.92 million per incident on average. Additionally, this publication uncovered that data breaches originating from malicious digital attacks were both the most common and the most expensive types of security incidents.
TechCrunch reports that a security researcher stumbled across an exposed server on the internet containing databases with a total of more than 419 million records related to Facebook users. According to TechCrunch’s reporting, each database record contains a user’s unique Facebook account ID (from which it’s possible to determine a user name) and phone numbers attached to the account.
A data breach is a security incident where sensitive, protected confidential information is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by a person or persons with unauthorized access. Data breaches can involve financial information like credit card numbers or bank account details, personal health information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII), trade secrets or intellectual property.
A biometrics system used to secure more than 1.5 million locations around the world – including banks, police forces, and defence companies in the United States, UK, India, Japan, and the UAE – has suffered a major data breach, exposing a huge number of records. South Korean firm Suprema runs the web-based biometric access platform BioStar 2, but left the fingerprints and facial recognition data of more than one million people exposed on a publicly accessible database.
Cybersecurity breaches and regulatory compliance are this year’s themes. Marriott was sued and fined $124 million for their data breach back in 2014, according to The Wall Street Journal. Capital One leaked 100 million credit applications including Social Security Numbers. Both LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics exposed millions of patients’ medical records.
When malware sneaks inside your network, it needs to communicate back to the internet whether to exfiltrate sensitive datasets it found, accept commands of its evil masters or even simply let them know it has successfully infiltrated your infrastructure (with ransomware being one of the rare exceptions that doesn’t need such connection).
A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. Such an amazing choice of juicy news articles this week! I will skip the seriously weird and rapidly escalating circumstances of the Capital One breach, and instead dive into the some of the more low key, but nevertheless interesting items. First up, and for those of you who post infosec articles, something you will understand: stock photos.
Rapidly detecting an incident can be the difference between the survival or closure of a company after a cybersecurity breach. The longer it takes to detect, the more costly it becomes, and visibility plays a vital role in that process. As companies struggle to detect the foul play, contain the incident and coordinate response, without adequate enterprise visibility, the extent of the damage is likely to increase.
The FBI has arrested a 33-year-old software engineer in Seattle as part of an investigation into a massive data breach at financial services company Capital One. Paige A. Thompson, also known by the online handle “erratic,” has been charged with one count of computer fraud and abuse, after an investigation uncovered that a hacker had broken into cloud servers run by Capital One and stole data related to over 100 million credit-card applications.
Cyber security may be about to become more than AOB for organisational boards across the country. British Airways has been struck with a record-breaking £183-million fine as a result of its data breach last year in which around 500,000 customers had their data stolen, including credit card and CVV numbers.
