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Twitter on Wednesday said that its investigation found "no evidence" that users' data sold online was obtained by exploiting any security vulnerabilities in its systems. "Based on information and intel analyzed to investigate the issue, there is no evidence that the data being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems," the company  said  in a statement. "The data is likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources." The disclosure comes in the wake of  multiple   reports  that Twitter data belonging to millions of users – 5.4 million in November 2022, 400 million in December 2022, and 200 million last week – have been made available for sale on online criminal forums. The social media giant further said the breach "could not be correlated with the previously reported incident, nor with any new incident," adding no passwords were exposed. The two datasets published in

The latest breach announced by LastPass is a major cause for concern to security stakeholders. As often occurs, we are at a security limbo – on the one hand, as LastPass has noted, users who followed LastPass best practices would be exposed to practically zero to extremely low risk. However, to say that password best practices are not followed is a wild understatement. The reality is that there are very few organizations in which these practices are truly enforced. This puts security teams in the worst position, where exposure to compromise is almost certain, but pinpointing the users who created this exposure is almost impossible.  To assist them throughout this challenging time, Browser Security solution LayerX has launched a free offering of its platform, enabling security teams to gain visibility into all browsers on which the LastPass extension is installed and mitigate the potential impacts of the LastPass breach on their environments by informing vulnerable users and require t

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

The  August 2022 security breach  of LastPass may have been more severe than previously disclosed by the company. The popular password management service on Thursday revealed that malicious actors obtained a trove of personal information belonging to its customers that include their encrypted password vaults by using data siphoned from the earlier break-in. Among the data stolen are "basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service," the company  said . The August 2022 incident, which  remains  a subject of an ongoing investigation, involved the miscreants accessing source code and proprietary technical information from its development environment via a single compromised employee account. LastPass said this permitted the unidentified attacker to obtain credentials and keys that were subseque

Protecting customer data is critical for any business accepting online payment information. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), created by leading credit card companies, establishes best practices for protecting consumers' information. By adhering to these standards, businesses can ensure that their customer's personal and financial information is secure.  The PCI DSS security standards apply to any business that processes, stores, or transmits credit card information. Failure to comply with the PCI DSS can result in costly fines and penalties from credit card companies. It can also lead to a loss of customer trust, which can be devastating for any business. PCI DSS 4.0 was released in March 2022 and will replace the current PCI DSS 3.2.1 standard in March 2025. That provides a three-year transition period for organizations to be compliant with 4.0. The latest version of the standard will bring a new focus to an overlooked yet critically important ar

Medibank on Thursday confirmed that the threat actors behind the  devastating cyber attack  have posted another dump of data stolen from its systems on the dark web after its refusal to pay a ransom. "We are in the process of analyzing the data, but the data released appears to be the data we believed the criminal stole," the Australian health insurer  said . "While our investigation continues there are currently no signs that financial or banking data has been taken. And the personal data stolen, in itself, is not sufficient to enable identity and financial fraud. The raw data we have analyzed today so far is incomplete and hard to understand." The leak comes almost a month after the company acknowledged that personal data belonging to  around 9.7 million  of its current and former customers were accessed following a ransomware incident in October 2022. This includes 5.1 million Medibank customers, 2.8 million ahm customers, and 1.8 million international cust

Popular password management service LastPass said it's investigating a second security incident that involved attackers accessing some of its customer information. "We recently detected unusual activity within a third-party cloud storage service, which is currently shared by both LastPass and its affiliate, GoTo," LastPass CEO Karim Toubba  said . GoTo, formerly called LogMeIn, acquired LastPass in October 2015. In December 2021, the Boston-based firm  announced  plans to spin off LastPass as an independent company. The digital break-in resulted in the unauthorized third-party leveraging information obtained following a previous breach in August 2022 to access "certain elements of our customers' information." The August 2022 security event  targeted  its development environment, leading to the theft of some of its source code and technical information. In September, LastPass  revealed  the threat actor had access for four days. The scope of the breach

The French data protection watchdog on Tuesday fined electricity provider Électricité de France (EDF)  €600,000 for violating the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements. The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL)  said  the electric utility breached European regulation by storing the passwords for over 25,800 accounts by hashing them using the  MD5 algorithm  as recently as July 2022. It's worth noting that MD5, a message digest algorithm, is considered cryptographically broken as of December 2008 owing to the risk of  collision attacks . Furthermore, the authority noted that the passwords associated with 2,414,254 customer accounts had only been hashed and not  salted , exposing the account holders to potential cyber threats. The probe also pointed fingers at EDF for failing to comply with GDPR data retention policies and for providing "inaccurate information on the origin of the data collected." "Th

The Australian government has passed a bill that markedly increases the penalty for companies suffering from serious or repeated data breaches. To that end, the maximum fines have been bumped up from the current AU$2.22 million to AU$50 million, 30% of an entity's adjusted turnover in the relevant period, or three times the value of any benefit obtained through the misuse of information, whichever is greater. The turnover period is the time duration from when the contravention occurred to the end of the month when the incident is officially addressed. "Significant privacy breaches in recent months have shown existing safeguards are outdated and inadequate," Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus  said  in a statement. "These reforms make clear to companies that the penalty for a major data breach can no longer be regarded as the cost of doing business." The legislation, called the Privacy Legislation Amendment (Enforcement and Other Measures) Bill 2022, also bestow

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has  levied fines  of €265 million ($277 million) against Meta Platforms for failing to safeguard the personal data of more than half a billion users of its Facebook service, ramping up privacy enforcement against U.S. tech firms. The fines follow an inquiry initiated by the European regulator on April 14, 2021, close on the heels of a leak of a "collated dataset of Facebook personal data that had been made available on the internet." This included the  personal information  associated with 533 million users of the social media platform, such as their phone numbers, dates of birth, locations, email addresses, gender, marital status, account creation date, and other profile details. Meta acknowledged that the information was "old data" that was obtained by malicious actors by taking advantage of a technique called "phone number enumeration" to  scrape users' public profiles . This entailed misusing a t

The Indian government on Friday released a draft version of the much-awaited data protection regulation, making it the fourth such effort since it was first proposed in July 2018. The  Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 , as it's called,  aims  to secure personal data, while also seeking users' consent in what the draft claims is "clear and plain language" describing the exact kinds of information that will be collected and for what purpose. The draft is open for public consultation until December 17, 2022. India has over 760 million active internet users, necessitating that data generated and used by online platforms are subject to privacy rules to prevent abuse and increase accountability and trust. "The Bill will establish the comprehensive legal framework governing digital personal data protection in India," the government  said . "The Bill provides for the processing of digital personal data in a manner that recognizes the right of in

Australian health insurer Medibank today confirmed that personal data belonging to around 9.7 million of its current and former customers were accessed following a ransomware incident. The  attack , according to the company, was detected in its IT network on October 12 in a manner that it said was "consistent with the precursors to a ransomware event," prompting it to isolate its systems, but not before the attackers exfiltrated the data. "This figure represents around 5.1 million Medibank customers, around 2.8 million ahm customers, and around 1.8 million international customers," the Melbourne-based firm  noted . Compromised details include names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, as well as Medicare numbers (but not expiry dates) for ahm customers, and passport numbers (but not expiry dates) and visa details for international student customers. It further said the incident resulted in the theft of health claims data for about 16

Communication services provider Twilio this week disclosed that it experienced another "brief security incident" in June 2022 perpetrated by the same threat actor behind the  August hack  that resulted in unauthorized access of customer information. The security event occurred on June 29, 2022, the company said in an updated advisory shared this week, as part of its probe into the digital break-in. "In the June incident, a Twilio employee was socially engineered through voice phishing (or 'vishing') to provide their credentials, and the malicious actor was able to access customer contact information for a limited number of customers," Twilio  said . It further said the access gained following the successful attack was identified and thwarted within 12 hours, and that it had alerted impacted customers on July 2, 2022. The San Francisco-based firm did not reveal the exact number of customers impacted by the June incident, and why the disclosure was made

Australian health insurance firm Medibank on Wednesday disclosed that the personal information of all of its customers had been unauthorizedly accessed following a recent ransomware attack. In an update to its ongoing investigation into the incident, the firm  said  the attackers had access to "significant amounts of health claims data" as well as personal data belonging to its  ahm health insurance subsidiary  and international students. Medibank, which is one of the largest Australian private health insurance providers,  serves about 3.9 million customers  across the country. "We have evidence that the criminal has removed some of this data and it is now likely that the criminal has stolen further personal and health claims data," the company further added. "As a result, we expect that the number of affected customers could grow substantially." The company also said it's continuing its probe to determine what specific data has been stolen in th

U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have published a joint advisory warning of attacks perpetrated by a cybercrime gang known as the  Daixin Team  primarily targeting the healthcare sector in the country. "The Daixin Team is a ransomware and data extortion group that has targeted the HPH Sector with ransomware and data extortion operations since at least June 2022," the agencies  said . The alert was published Friday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Over the past four months, the group has been linked to multiple ransomware incidents in the Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) sector, encrypting servers related to electronic health records, diagnostics, imaging, and intranet services. It's also said to have exfiltrated personal identifiable information (PII) and patient health information (PHI) as part of a double extortion scheme to se

Microsoft this week confirmed that it inadvertently exposed information related to thousands of customers following a security lapse that left an endpoint publicly accessible over the internet sans any authentication. "This misconfiguration resulted in the potential for unauthenticated access to some business transaction data corresponding to interactions between Microsoft and prospective customers, such as the planning or potential implementation and provisioning of Microsoft services," Microsoft  said  in an alert. Microsoft also emphasized that the B2B leak was "caused by an unintentional misconfiguration on an endpoint that is not in use across the Microsoft ecosystem and was not the result of a security vulnerability." The misconfiguration of the Azure Blob Storage was spotted on September 24, 2022, by cybersecurity company SOCRadar, which termed the leak  BlueBleed . Microsoft said it's in the process of directly notifying impacted customers. The Win

In a US SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission)  8-K filing , Omnicell, the healthcare technology provider, revealed that some of its products, services, and internal systems were affected by ransomware.  Upon detecting the incident, the medication management systems provider took immediate action to contain the attack and ensure continued operation. In its  10-Q form  filing, Omnicell disclosed that cyber-attacks or data breaches disrupted its business.  Will you be the next victim? If you overlook the importance of data protection, attackers can get you in no time.  Explore the  impact of the data breach  on the healthcare sector and what preventive measures can be taken against such attacks. Omnicell Announced Data Breach  Founded in 1992, Omnicell is a leading provider of medication management solutions for hospitals, long-term care facilities, and retail pharmacies.  On May 4, 2022 , Omnicell's IT systems and third-party cloud services were affected by ransomware attac

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has arrested a 19-year-old teen from Sydney for allegedly attempting to leverage the data leaked following the Optus data breach late last month to extort victims. The suspect is said to have carried out a text message blackmail scam, demanding that the recipients transfer $2,000 to a bank account or risk getting their personal information misused for fraudulent activities. The source of the data, the agency said, was a sample database of 10,200 records that was posted briefly on a cybercrime forum accessible on the clearnet by an actor named "optusdata," before taking it down. Details of the scam were  previously shared  by 9News Australia reporter Chris O'Keefe on September 27, 2022. The AFP further said it executed a search warrant at the home of the offender, leading to the seizure of a mobile phone used to send the text messages to about 93 Optus customers. "At this stage it appears none of the individuals who received t

A U.S. federal court jury has found former Uber Chief Security Officer Joseph Sullivan guilty of not disclosing a 2016 breach of customer and driver records to regulators and attempting to cover up the incident. Sullivan has been convicted on two counts: One for obstructing justice by not reporting the incident and another for misprision. He faces a maximum of five years in prison for the obstruction charge, and a maximum of three years for the latter. "Technology companies in the Northern District of California collect and store vast amounts of data from users," U.S. Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds  said  in a press statement. "We expect those companies to protect that data and to alert customers and appropriate authorities when such data is stolen by hackers. Sullivan affirmatively worked to hide the data breach from the Federal Trade Commission and took steps to prevent the hackers from being caught." The 2016 breach of Uber occurred as a result of two hackers

Australia's largest telecommunications company Telstra disclosed that it was the victim of a data breach through a third-party, nearly two weeks after Optus reported a breach of its own. "There has been no breach of Telstra's systems," Narelle Devine, the company's chief information security officer for the Asia Pacific region,  said . "And no customer account data was involved." It said the breach targeted a third-party platform called  Work Life NAB  that's no longer actively used by the company, and that the leaked data posted on the internet concerned a "now-obsolete Telstra employee rewards program." Telstra also noted it became aware of the breach last week, adding the information included first and last names and the email addresses used to sign up for the program. It further clarified that the data posted was from 2017. The data was "basic in nature," Devine said.  The company did not reveal how many employees wer

Australian telecom giant Optus on Monday confirmed that nearly 2.1 million of its current and former customers suffered a leak of their personal information and at least one form of identification number as a result of a  data breach  late last month. The company also  said  it has engaged the services of Deloitte to conduct an external forensic assessment of the attack to "understand how it occurred and how we can prevent it from occurring again." Optus is fully owned by Singaporean telecommunications conglomerate Singtel, which also has a significant stake in Bharti Airtel, the second largest carrier in India. "Approximately 1.2 million customers have had at least one number from a current and valid form of identification, and personal information, compromised," Singtel  said  in an announcement made on its website. It also said the breach affected expired IDs and personal information of about 900,000 additional customers. It further emphasized that the expo