Security News

Any EU country can take legal action against companies like Facebook over cross-border violations of data privacy rules, not just the main regulator in charge of the company, a top court adviser said Wednesday. The preliminary opinion is part of a long-running legal battle between Facebook and Belgium's data protection authority over the company's use of cookies to track the behavior of internet users, even those who weren't members of the social network.

Hackers have started leaking documents related to COVID-19 medicine and vaccines that were stolen from the European Medicines Agency in early December 2020. While EMA did not provide information on the affected third-parties, Pfizer and BioNTech at the time published a joint statement to reveal that the incident resulted in hackers accessing "Some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine candidate, BNT162b2."

The European Union unveiled Wednesday plans to revamp the 27-nation bloc's dated cybersecurity rules, just days after data on a new coronavirus vaccine was unlawfully accessed in a hack attack on the European Medicines Agency. The EU last year recorded around 450 cyber incidents involving European infrastructure, notably in the financial and energy sectors, and the pandemic has highlighted Europe's deep dependence on the internet and exposed security weaknesses.

The Open Group and the University of York announced a partnership with a consortium of leading European research organizations, software developers, and industrial big data users. Today's development teams face substantial challenges when it comes to ensuring hybrid big data applications and services are designed coherently, which requires capturing a range of different formats that data is held within.

Threat actors behind an ongoing worldwide mobile banking fraud campaign were able to steal millions from multiple US and EU banks, needing just a few days for each attack. While emulators are not malicious tools, the group behind this campaign used them for malicious purposes emulating compromised devices or setting up what looked like new devices picked up by the compromised accounts' owners.

Big tech companies face hefty fines in the European Union and Britain if they treat rivals unfairly or fail to protect users on their platforms, in proposed regulations unveiled Tuesday by officials in Brussels and London. Big tech companies won't be allowed, for example, to stop users from uninstalling preinstalled software or apps, nor will they be able to use data from business users to compete against them.

Ireland's Data Protection Commission has fined Twitter €450,000 after ruling a bug in the firm's Android app that allowed users' private messages to be publicly viewed infringed the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. "The DPC's investigation commenced in January, 2019 following receipt of a breach notification from Twitter and the DPC has found that Twitter infringed Article 33(1) and 33(5) of the GDPR in terms of a failure to notify the breach on time to the DPC and a failure to adequately document the breach. The DPC has imposed an administrative fine of €450,000 on Twitter as an effective, proportionate and dissuasive measure" the DPC said.

Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Twitter €450,000 for failing to notify the DPC of a breach within the 72-hour timeframe imposed by European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and to adequately document it. "The DPC's investigation commenced in January 2019 following receipt of a breach notification from Twitter and the DPC has found that Twitter infringed Article 33(1) and 33(5) of the GDPR in terms of a failure to notify the breach on time to the DPC and a failure to adequately document the breach," the Irish DPC said.

Another cyberattack has been launched - this time, threat actors were able to break into the European Medicines Agency server and access documentation about the vaccine candidate from Pfizer and BioNTech. "Today, we were informed by the European Medicines Agency that the agency has been subject to a cyberattack and that some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, which has been stored on an EMA server, had been unlawfully accessed," the Pfizer-BioNTech statement said.

The EU Medicines Agency today revealed it was hacked, just a week after infosec eggheads said foreign state hackers have been targeting European institutions. BioNTech, the German biotech firm that is developing a COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine with Pfizer said it was told by EMA that the miscreants had stolen from an agency computer files submitted by BioNTech and Pfizer describing their vaccine as part of the regulatory approval process.