Security News

74% of respondents expect a second wave of COVID-19 impact, with 51% planning to move more applications to the cloud to prepare for it. The impact on businesses' cloud adoption plans - with 40% currently accelerating their move to the cloud - has led to increases across a range of related decisions as companies prepare for future COVID-related shutdowns.

UK government has published the contracts it holds with private tech firms and the NHS for the creation of a COVID-19 data store, just days after campaigners fired legal shots over a lack of transparency. Campaign groups Foxglove and openDemocracy, which brought the action, said that the documents show the tech firms were set to build data models for commercial purposes from NHS training data before being challenged.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization this week publicly condemned the malicious cyber-activities directed against COVID-19 responders. Now, a month later, the North Atlantic Council issued a public statement condemning the "Destabilizing and malicious cyber activities" targeting entities critical to the response against the COVID-19 pandemic, such as healthcare services, hospitals and research institutes.

Automated exposure notification services are set to be released in the coming weeks to help track the spread of the COVID-19 virus and deliver notifications to individuals who might have been exposed. The Exposure Notification Privacy Act makes participation in these exposure notification systems voluntary, based on affirmative, express consent, and also provides consumers with increased control over their data.

Mobile phishing is on the rise according to a new study from cybersecurity company Lookout, which found a 37% increase in enterprise mobile phishing in the first quarter of 2020. According to data collected by Lookout researchers, unmitigated mobile phishing threats could cost organizations with 10,000 mobile devices as much as $35 million per incident, and up to $150 million for organizations with 50,000 mobile devices.

Empire Market is one of the most popular places to buy illegal goods on the dark web, transacting a little over $1,000,000 a week. Empire Market has over 52 thousand listings across 11 categories, but the Drugs & Chemicals category dwarfs the others by an order of magnitude.

Modern vishing attacks use research-based social engineering to attack targets with convincing scams. On the surface, it might seem like vishing attacks are a consumer problem only.

A fresh ransomware strain known as "[F]Unicorn" has emerged, first seen this week targeting users by pretending to be an official government COVID-19 contact tracing app. According to an advisory from the Computer Emergency Response Team from the Agency for Digital Italy, the malware family is taking advantage of the rollout of "Immuni" - Italy's official coronavirus-tracking app.

Results from separate studies by Checkmarx and ExpressVPN reveal consumers won't easily share their personal information with tracing apps due to concern for misuse. The VPN provider ExpressVPN and software security company Checkmarx queried 1,200 and 1,500 consumers, respectively, to find out what Americans think about digital contact-tracing systems having access to their health information.

A new report from Forter has found that, since its April report, there have been "New and steady increases in online consumer purchasing volumes." The new findings, which were gathered through Forter's global merchant network-which processes upwards of $150 billion each year-look at how e-commerce consumer behavior and fraud are changing during COVID-19.