By now, the headlines will scarcely surprise anyone. Yet another business has suffered a major data breach. This time, it was Omni Hotels, a luxury hotel chain. The breach, which was discovered on May 30, 2016, began December 23, 2015 and was not completely eradicated from the company’s network until June 14, 2016.
Unfortunately, we do not have any information at this time as to how many customers may have been impacted, nor which specific hotel locations were infected.
The world’s hackers are branching out. No longer content to simply breach the digital fortresses that today’s businesses and governments have become, they’re now beginning to turn their attention to automobiles, too. In recent weeks, four vehicles with electronic key FOBs and digital security measures have been stolen.
In the old days, before the rise of the iPad and iPhone, hackers were mostly content to leave Apple alone. They had such a tiny slice of the computer market that it was generally deemed as being more trouble than it was worth to create a virus that would only impact such a small number of devices.
Identity theft is a large, pervasive, and growing problem. In fact, statistics show that the instances of identity theft jumped a staggering 57% last year alone, this, according to figures from the fraud-prevention service Cifas.
The firm’s research into the increase of identity theft found that much of the growth has seen fraudsters targeting a younger demographic (ages 30 and under), with 24,000 victims in this age group in 2015, compared with 15,766 in 2014, and 11,000 victims in this age group in 2010.
In order to successfully assume a person’s identity, the first order of business is to obtain as much personal information as possible.
Most people engaged in legitimate business have no idea just how profitable hacking can be. Hummingbad is a case in point. Part of the “Hummer” family of Trojans, this bit of malware is the most widely installed Trojan on the mobile device ecosystem, impacting more than two billion Android users worldwide.
Security researchers from Cisco’s Talos Group have discovered a huge and disturbing spike in spam emails containing a widely used ransomware called Zepto. In fact, the team has uncovered 137,731 such emails over just a four-day period, containing more than three thousand unique samples.
Ransomware has become one of the fastest growing cybercrimes of 2016. Worse, these attacks are growing in their sophistication, and the hackers deploying ransomware have been upping their game by branching out onto different systems.
As evidence, according to data provided by Kaspersky Lab, the number of users being attacked by mobile ransomware has quadrupled from last year to this.
Hard Rock Hotel & Casino has had some hard luck when it comes to data breaches. Last year, the company admitted that hackers had breached their POS (Point of Sale) credit card processing system from September 2014 through April of 2015, swiping credit card numbers, expiration dates, and card holder names.
By now, you’ve almost certainly heard the news. Microsoft’s latest OS, Windows 10, is free for the moment, but that’s ending as of July 29. After that point, if you want to upgrade, you’ll have to pay.
There is no doubt that the launch and adoption of Windows 10 has been wildly successful.
Ransomware is becoming an epidemic. It’s one of the fastest growing kinds of attacks we’re seeing in 2016, and the hacking community has shown a tremendous appetite for expanding the scope and scale of their operations.
PCs and laptops were, of course, obvious targets for this kind of attack, but we’re now seeing strains of ransomware that can attack smartphones, and lock you out of them, just like the software locks you out of your PC. There’s even at least one strain of ransomware that targets smart TVs.
Of course, for these types of software to work, the user has to be tricked into running the poisoned app and giving it administrator permissions, but there are tried and true methodologies for doing so.
