Security News
Despite ongoing unsubstantiated claims of fraud from the outgoing Trump administration, senior election officials charged with securing the 2020 vote on Thursday said they had done so successfully. "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," said the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council Executive Committees in a joint statement, along with the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other organizations.
Menacing emails to Democratic voters, telling them to vote for Donald Trump in the upcoming US elections or else, were sent by Iran, US intelligence claimed on Wednesday night. At a press conference tonight, Uncle Sam's Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said the messages were actually sent by Iranian agents, who had obtained US voter records, including contact details, seemingly to intimidate Americans.
The front man for the notorious Dark Overlord hacker gang, which threatened to leak stolen confidential information unless paid off, has been sentenced to five years behind bars in America. Wyatt was among a crew of miscreants who since 2016 operated under the Dark Overlord brand: they would hack people and organizations, and threaten to dump their victims' private documents onto the web unless payment - typically between $75,000 and $350,000 in Bitcoin - was coughed up.
The American Payroll Association says user information was stolen after attackers managed to inject a skimmer on its website. A payroll education, publications, and training provider, APA helps professionals increase their skill, offering payroll conferences and seminars, resources, and certification.
Online shopping is the most prevalent type of scam with people losing nearly $14 million to date, according to FTC data. Americans have reported 152,129 coronavirus-related fraud cases to the Federal Trade Commission since the start of 2020, according to data analyzed by Atlas VPN. FTC data further revealed that Americans have lost more than $98 million to COVID-19 and stimulus check scams.
The majority of Americans characterized data privacy as a human right, yet most still don't take adequate security precautions with their information, a KPMG report found. KPMG's The New Imperative for Corporate Data Responsibility report, released on Wednesday, surveyed American consumers to determine their attitudes toward data privacy and what they expect from corporations.
The Empire State's financial regulator said First American Title Insurance was so negligent with securing its data, it broke state laws on the protection of non-public information. "For more than four years, First American Title Insurance Company exposed tens of millions of documents that contained consumers' sensitive personal information including bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and drivers' license images," the DFS charged [PDF].
In May 2019, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the website of mortgage title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. had exposed approximately 885 million records related to mortgage deals going back to 2003. On Wednesday, regulators in New York announced that First American was the target of their first ever cybersecurity enforcement action in connection with the incident, charges that could bring steep financial penalties.
You don't have to pay to vote in the US. Up until recently, you wouldn't have necessarily known that, were you to have run a Google search for how or where to vote. Such a search would have been polluted with ads like this one offering "Same-day processing" of voter registration for $129:. That ad, which directs to a site from PrivacyWall.org, is the first ad in a Google search for "Register to vote" that was run in an analysis done by watchdog Tech Transparency Project.
Less than one-third of Americans said they are concerned about their data security while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Unisys Security report found. The Unisys Security Index, released on Tuesday, calculates a score out of 300 that measures consumer attitudes over eight areas of security in four categories.