Security News
This law journal article discusses the role of class-action litigation to secure the Internet of Things. Basically, the article postulates that market realities will produce insecure IoT devices, and political failures will leave that industry unregulated.
A lawsuit seeking class action status filed against UW Medicine in the wake of a data leak incident has been amended to reflect that at least one HIV patient allegedly had their data exposed. The lawsuit alleges UW Medicine, a Seattle-based academic medical system that includes several hospitals and a large physician practice, failed to properly protect PHI when it misconfigured a database, leaving nearly 974,000 patients' information exposed to the internet for several weeks.
The lawsuit alleges that Google has used the service to collect data of children using the service, including their physical locations, websites they visit, terms used in Google's search engine and videos watched on YouTube. In all of these cases, the lawsuit alleges, Google has not properly disclosed to users that it's collecting this data.
Several law firms are racing to be among the first to file class action lawsuits against PIH Health in the wake of the California-based regional healthcare network reporting last month that a 2019 phishing breach affected nearly 200,000 individuals. Since Jan. 30, at least three law firms have issued public statements announcing they are "Investigating" the data breach reported on Jan. 10 by PIH Health and inviting victims of the incident to contact the firms with information about the impact.
Facebook has agreed to pay $550 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging the company violated Illinois law in collecting data for a facial recognition tool without users' consent. The settlement - revealed by company executives during a Wednesday earnings call - came after Facebook failed this month in its efforts to get the U.S. Supreme court to throw out the lawsuit.
The $380.5 million will be placed into a fund for consumers affected who are part of the class outlined in the lawsuit. It should also be noted that of the 147 million affected by the data breach, approximately 15 million are part of the class action lawsuit.
Still, Chief Judge Thomas W. Thrash Jr. writes that "This settlement is the largest and most comprehensive recovery in a data breach case in U.S. history by several orders of magnitude." The minimum cost to Equifax will be $1.38 billion, which includes $1 billion in security upgrades, Thrash writes. "This settlement is the largest and most comprehensive recovery in a data breach case in U.S. history by several orders of magnitude."-Chief Judge Thomas W. Thrash Jr. Equifax failed to catch such a large exfiltration of data because a security certificate on a traffic monitoring device had expired, the report says.
After a data breach, if individuals' stolen information is offered for sale on the dark web, that potentially bolsters class action lawsuits filed by plaintiffs against the breached organization, says technology attorney Steven Teppler of the law firm Mandelbaum Salsburg P.C. Data offered for sale "Actually shows that someone is attempting to monetize the victims' information," he says in an interview with Information Security Media Group. The clinic reported a health data breach in July 2016 to the Department of Health and Human Services as a "Unauthorized access/disclosure" incident involving its electronic health records and affecting 201,000 individuals.
A lawsuit against DCH Health System in the wake of a ransomware attack that disrupted medical services for several days alleges that the Alabama-based organization failed "To properly maintain and safeguard its computer systems and data." For several days, DCH diverted ambulances and patients to other area facilities as it dealt with the ransomware attack it discovered on Oct. 1.
The Wawa convenience store chain is facing a wave of lawsuits over a data breach that affected its 850 locations along the East Coast. read more