A study released Wednesday shows one in four consumers who receive a data breach letter become the victim of identity fraud. That statistic represented 12.6 million victims last year — one million more than the year before, according to the 2013 Identity Fraud Report released by Javelin Strategy & Research.
For all intents and purposes, the Heartland Payment Systems data breach saga ended more than two years ago when the embattled payment processor finalized settlements paying out millions of dollars to various banks, credit card issuers and consumers. That is until a handful of banks reportedly requested the Fifth Circuit reopen their negligence case that stemmed from the 2008 breach.
Internet Explorer continues to dominate Microsoft’s 2013 security updates. Among the 12 bulletins and 57 vulnerabilities patched in today’s release was a cumulative update for the maligned browser and another fix for a bug being exploited in the wild.Last month, an out-of-band fix for IE 6-8 patched zero-day flaws being exploited in a series of watering hole attacks against government, telecommunications, manufacturing and human rights sites.
Virtualization software maker VMware issued an update last Thursday resolving a virtual machine communication interface (VMCI) vulnerability in its ESX Server, Workstation, Fusion and View products that could lead to a privilege escalation if unpatched.According to the VMware security advisory, a local attacker could potentially exploit a control code handling vulnerability in vmci.sys in order to tamper with memory allocation in the VMCI code and eventually obtain elevated privileges on Windows-based hosts and guest operating systems.
Tired of all those malware and vulnerability reports that count how many of each have been reported to security companies? Well, Microsoft has taken a different tack in its latest Security Intelligence Report (SIR) by globally comparing regions’ relative security against socio-economic factors including the maturity of a national or regional cybersecurity policy.The results aren’t so surprising; areas such as Europe with well-defined, long-standing and enforceable policies rate much better than less developed nations where crime per capita is higher, there’s less broadband penetration and a higher rate of piracy.
Microsoft announced yesterday it will ship 12 bulletins addressing 57 vulnerabilities in the February 2013 Patch Tuesday release of security updates. Five of the updates, which Microsoft will release Tuesday, received “critical” ratings while the remaining seven are considered “important.”
A former Minnesota state employee was charged Thursday with misdemeanors for allegedly accessing thousands of driver’s licenses during a four-year period and storing 172 of them in an encrypted file. Ninety percent of victims in the data breach were women.John A. Hunt, 48, of Woodbury, Minn., faces six misdemeanors, including misconduct by a public employee and unauthorized computer access. He is accused of illegally querying the state Driver and Vehicle Services database more than 19,000 times between 2008 and last October. If convicted, he could receive up to a year in jail and $3,000 in fines.
Facebook is serious about its new Graph Search feature, which helps users of the social media site narrowly search for friends with common interests in a much more intuitive fashion than a Google search, for example. Founder Mark Zuckerberg had tagged Graph Search the third Facebook pillar, right alongside the site’s news feed and timeline. So why are security and privacy experts nervous? There’s some serious horsepower behind Graph Search, and there are users whose interests aren’t as benign as finding friends of friends in a particular location who happen to like country music, fine wine and yoga.
A Maine-based company announced Thursday it fired an otherwise exemplary employee who dowloaded medical data onto a jump drive and then lost the device while traveling between Salt Lake City, Denver and Washington, D.C.
By David Mortman
After a long 2.5 years Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford, the authors of the awesome Visible Ops series, have just launched their latest book, The Phoenix Project. I was fortunate enough to get to read some early drafts, so I am extra excited that it is finally shipping. When Gene first mentioned the book to me, I was rather surprised that it was a novel. I was a bit skeptical of the choice of genre but dove in anyway, and I am so glad I did.
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
