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Data Breaches Getting Worse and Mobile Perfect Exploit Vector
Friends,
Just looking at the total number of breaches in June, we see an
explosive growth. Ransomware is not only on the rise, it’s also getting
very creative and on top of that, we’re seeing mobile becoming the
perfect exploit vector – devices in all our back pockets, coming in and
out of work, behind the corporate firewall. Whether you’re worried
about data loss prevention (DLP) or trying the manage the bring your
own device (BYOD) dilemma, we have our hands full with infectible
mobile computing. Smartphones have become faster and faster computing devices with more
memory and storage than ever. They have Bluetooth, wifi, NFC, webcams, hard drives,
microphones, keyboards – what more could one ask for to create the perfect backdoor to spy on
organizations?
So, back to June, we’re looking, so far, at 290M records stolen. This is a huge number, putting
the total # of personally identifyable records (PII) breached to date, at more than 900M, as
documented at privacyrights.org. We’re looking at the following big breaches this month:
51 million iMesh passwords
154 million facebook profiles
77k accounts of State Farm customers
45 million records from VerticalScope.com
21,000 records at the University of Greenwich
…and the list goes on and on…
What are the few key things we keep finding in common in all these breaches? Poor or no
encryption processes and tools in place. Commonly exploitable vulnerabilities that could have
been detected and removed from a simple audit and finally rogue access to these networks
from Remote Access Trojans (RATs) running over the internet after a spear-phishing attack.
Let’s get smarter about how we proactively defend against this easily recognized pattern of
attacks. We can work together to not be victimized if we understand how we’re being exploited.
To our faithful readers, Enjoy
Pierluigi Paganini
Pierluigi Paganini, Editor-in-Chief, [email protected]
3 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – June 2016 Edition
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