October is Cyber Security Awareness Month and what better way to demonstrate awareness than by announcing that over 140 million records were leaked in October (and that’s just the ones we know about)?
However, in terms of data breaches and cyber attacks, it’s been rather quiet, and that the majority of records leaked this month have been from breaches that occurred in prior months.
One of the biggest stories this month was the outage of some major sites such as Twitter, Spotify and my all-time favourite site, Reddit. The outage was caused by a massive DDoS attack on Dyn, which is the DNS service that the above sites and many others use. The majority of people who weren’t able to access these sites were based on the east coast of the United States.
Data breach
Medical marijuana patients’ personal information found in trash pile
Security Firm Tries Desperate Solution to Alert Company of Data Leak
Hacker grabs over 58 million customer records from data storage firm
IES users’ data leaked due to ‘inadequate’ security measures: PDPC
Boxes of patient information missing from Florida Hospital in Orlando
Information of 13,000 Baystate patients possibly compromised due to “phishing”
Laptop with crucial CMO data stolen
Lincoln health center warning patients of data breach, fired worker
Nurse suspended after snooping through 64 patients records
RedBus confirms hack, says no sign of user passwords being stolen yet
Rainbow Children’s Clinic notifies 33,368 patients of ransomware attack
Event Organizer Suffers Data Breach After Hacker Steals Mailing Lists
19 patients affected in ‘accidental’ Eastern Health privacy breach
Tax credits firm in ‘data protection breach’
Province says it might have sent tax documents to wrong addresses
Massive data leak hits Bohri Muslims ahead of Moharram
Northwest Community notifies patients of R-C Healthcare breach
Private student information mistakenly posted online by Surrey School Board
96,000 public servants in new data breachTop of Form
Simple Website Flaw Exposed Data Of Charter Internet Customers
Surgeon General warns staff that personal information may have been stolen
Illegal pot dispensary customers fume over email privacy breach
Data breach at Weebly affects 43 million users
Cyber attack
Hutchinson Community Foundation falls victim to data breach
DDoS attack against DNS provider knocks major sites offline
Who cut off Julian Assange’s internet access? Ecuador, accusing him of interfering in US election
Black hat hacker used printers to distribute anti-Semitic flyers
Cyberattack on 3D-Printed Component Destroys Drone Mid-Air
Financial
Whoops: Pro-Donald Trump super PAC publishes donor credit card numbers
Hackers stole credit card data from Republican website for 6 months
About 1,000 Members Victimized In Skimming Breach
Vera Bradley discloses payment card security breach
UCF police trace credit card fraud to restaurant malware
Hutton Hotel notifying guests of breach that began in 2012
Senate Republicans were skimmed for six months, quietly fix store
Fighting back
Two jailed for illegally trading student information
TalkTalk gets record £400,000 fine for failing to prevent October 2015 attack
Man arrested for streaming porn to electronic billboard
LinkedIn hacking suspect identified by feds
Trends and traits of data breaches
To help you understand the trends and traits of data breaches, what they are, how and why they occur, and what you can do to avoid suffering a similar fate, take a look at our book of the month: Managing Information Security Breaches – Studies from real life by Michael Krausz.
This thought-provoking guide details how breaches can be treated and the direction you should take if you’ve been affected.
It just goes to show, Forewarned is forearmed. Organizations end to invest more time in educating personnel.
To quote from the Origin Title “Wing Commander 3”.
The price of freedom, is eternal vigilance.
The key to a safer infrastructure, is educating personal.