Helping to define and examine the top perceived cloud security threats of the day, the ‘Egregious Eleven’ is the most recent iteration in an evolving set of summary reports published by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). It follows on from the ‘Treacherous Twelve,’ which they defined for us in 2016, and the ‘Notorious Nine,’ which they presented in 2013.
We are living in the era of the digital economy where companies are collecting and storing lots of valuable customer data on a daily basis. As it has turned out, data is an important input in the competitiveness, growth, and revenue generation for any company across industries. But every valuable resource has its vulnerabilities, and data is not left out in this unfortunate fact. A notable vulnerability of sensitive data that has left many IT departments scratching their heads is data breaching.
Earlier this week, I heard a fascinating interview with the former Chief Information Officer of Equifax, Graeme Payne. If you are unfamiliar with Graeme, he was the scapegoat for the Equifax breach; described in Congressional testimony as “the human error” that caused the breach. Graeme, however, is a true gentleman who is very gracious about his situation.
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.
