UnitedHealthcare CEO says ‘maybe a third’ of US citizens were affected by recent hack | TechCrunch

May 2, 2024May 1, 2024 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Two months after hackers broke into Change Healthcare systems stealing and then encrypting company data, it’s still unclear how many Americans were impacted by the cyberattack.

Last month, Andrew Witty, the CEO of Change Healthcare’s parent company UnitedHealth Group, said that the stolen files include the personal health information of “a substantial proportion of people in America.”

On Wednesday, during a House hearing, when pushed to give a more definitive answer, Witty testified that the breach impacted “I think, maybe a third [of Americans] or somewhere of that level.”

Tesla begins notifying workers who were affected by data breach | CNN Business

August 22, 2023August 20, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Tesla has begun notifying current and former employees whose information was included in a confidential data breach in May.

In a notice posted on the Maine Attorney General’s website on Friday, Tesla (TSLA) said an investigation had found “two former Tesla (TSLA) employees misappropriated the information in violation of Tesla (TSLA)’s IT security and data protection policies” and that the electric automaker had since filed lawsuits against them.

“These lawsuits resulted in the seizure of the former employees’ electronic devices that were believed to have contained the Tesla information,” Tesla said. The company added that it “also obtained court orders that prohibit the former employees from further use, access, or dissemination of the data, subject to criminal penalties.”

Parsing Samsung’s data breach notice | TechCrunch

September 7, 2022September 6, 2022 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Hours before a long holiday weekend in the United States, electronics giant Samsung announced its U.S. systems were breached a month earlier by malicious hackers, who broke in and made off with gobs of personal information about an unspecified number of its customers.

The data breach is likely significant. Samsung is one of the largest technology companies with hundreds of millions of device owners — and users — around the world. But Samsung’s poorly explained data breach notice, coupled with its unexplained delay in disclosing the data breach, left customers reading the tea-leaves and without a clear idea of what they can do to protect themselves, if at all.

DoorDash hit by data breach linked to Twilio hackers | TechCrunch

August 26, 2022August 25, 2022 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Food delivery giant DoorDash has confirmed a data breach that exposed customers’ personal information.

In a blog post shared with TechCrunch ahead of its publication at market close, DoorDash said malicious hackers stole credentials from employees of a third-party vendor that were then used to gain access to some of DoorDash’s internal tools.

DoorDash said the attackers accessed names, email addresses, delivery addresses and phone numbers of DoorDash customers. For a “smaller subset” of users, hackers accessed partial payment card information, including card type and the last four digits of the card number.

The T-Mobile Data Breach Is One You Can’t Ignore | WIRED

August 19, 2021August 16, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

NOT ALL DATA breaches are created equal. None of them are good, but they do come in varying degrees of bad. And given how regularly they happen, it’s understandable that you may have become inured to the news. Still, a T-Mobile breach that hackers claim involved the data of 100 million people deserves your attention, especially if you’re a customer of the “un-carrier.”

As first reported by Motherboard on Sunday, someone on the dark web claims to have obtained the data of 100 million from T-Mobile’s servers and is selling a portion of it on an underground forum for 6 bitcoin, about $280,000. The trove includes not only names, phone numbers, and physical addresses but also more sensitive data like social security numbers, driver’s license information, and IMEI numbers, unique identifiers tied to each mobile device. Motherboard confirmed that samples of the data “contained accurate information on T-Mobile customers.”

T-Mobile is investigating a reported data breach. It sounds real bad. | Mashable

August 17, 2021August 15, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

T-Mobile customers may want to brace for some bad news.

The mobile service provider is investigating a reported data breach that may have exposed the private info of more than 100 million people. The would-be perpetrator is apparently trying to sell off a portion of the data, Vice noted in a Sunday report.

The site spoke with the anonymous author of a forum post offering up roughly one-third of the T-Mobile USA customer data in exchange for 6 bitcoins (worth a bit less than $280,000 as of Aug. 15). While it could all be BS, Vice was able to look at samples of the data and confirm that the seller has “accurate information on T-Mobile customers.”

It Takes 191 Days for a Company to Realize There’s Been a Data Breach | Small Business Trends

October 1, 2018September 30, 2018 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Cases of unauthorized persons stealing or accessing sensitive small business data like intellectual property, employees’ personal information or even financial records have been rising.

What’s sad is that when a data breach occurs, companies take an average of 191 days to realize it has happened, according to a recent report highlighted by TekMonks, a global enterprise software development and IT services company.

This slow response to cyber-attacks is alarming. It puts small businesses in a precarious position and demonstrates a dire need for cyber-security awareness and preparedness in every business.

What These 4 Data Breaches Can Tell Us About Security | All Business

June 26, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes, and anyone can fail — especially in the business world.

IBM’s “2015 Cost of Data Breach Study” shows that the average total cost of a data breach is $3.8 million, representing a 23 percent increase since 2013. The cost for each lost or stolen record increased 6 percent, from a consolidated average of $145 to $154.

Several companies also have been sued for their negligence in preventing these attacks. Data breaches are huge failures, but taking a look at these four big ones can teach us a thing or two about how to better secure our data.