Catagory:Breaches

1
Travel-booking site Orbitz hit with major data breach
2
Facebook’s privacy breach puts spotlight on Australian election campaigns
3
Facebook ‘hack’: fake news or a serious breach of privacy?
4
Bug Bounty Programs – your company’s friend or foe?
5
The Sydney Declaration: ASEAN and Australia commit to cooperate on cybersecurity and digital trade issues
6
Weather Bureau IT mining cryptocurrencies?
7
Cybersecurity vulnerability revealed after NSW Government agency’s 49-day hack
8
Cybercrime most costly to financial services
9
Hackers target cryptocurrency via Tesla’s public cloud: don’t mine our business – mind your own business!
10
Mandatory Data Breach Reporting in 60 seconds

Travel-booking site Orbitz hit with major data breach

By Cameron Abbott and Sarah Goegan

Travel-booking site Orbitz confirmed that it has suffered a major data security breach, in which details of up to 880,000 credit cards were compromised.

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Facebook’s privacy breach puts spotlight on Australian election campaigns

By Cameron Abbott and Georgia Mills

News of Facebook’s involvement in the United States’ elections is nothing new, especially with the ongoing Cambridge Analytica scandal, so it should come as little surprise that the social media giant has extended its reach into the Australian electoral sphere.

Facebook approached Australia’s major political parties during the 2016 Federal election offering a powerful data matching tool. This “advanced matching” tool would allow parties to match data they had collected about voters- including names, dates of birth, contact details, and postcodes- against similar information provided by users on their Facebook profiles. The combined data would allow parties to identify swinging voters and target them with tailored ads when they use Facebook.

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Facebook ‘hack’: fake news or a serious breach of privacy?

By Cameron Abbott and Samantha Tyrrell

It has been alleged that Cambridge Analytica, a political data analytics firm specialising in psychological profiling, has tapped more than 50 million users’ Facebook profiles without their consent and subsequently used the data to assist Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign.

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Bug Bounty Programs – your company’s friend or foe?

By Cameron Abbott, Keely O’Dowd and Samantha Tyrrell

Bug Bounty Programs (BBPs) actively encourage hackers to explore a company’s systems and report back on any vulnerability they discover. Often, pre-determined financial incentives are offered to the “security researcher” in return for their findings. The attraction of this process is obvious; rather than suffering a cyber incident that could – and for many organisations has – cost millions of dollars and resulted in reputational damage, companies can instead make a comparatively small payment to ethical “white hat” hackers with the intention of pre-empting an incident.

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The Sydney Declaration: ASEAN and Australia commit to cooperate on cybersecurity and digital trade issues

By Cameron Abbott and Keely O’Dowd

Over the weekend our closest neighbours agreed to greater cooperation on cyber security. The Member States of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Secretary-General of ASEAN and Australian leaders met in Sydney to strengthen the ASEAN-Australia relationship. The leaders discussed issues of regional importance.

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Weather Bureau IT mining cryptocurrencies?

By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace

The Australian Federal Police are investigating two members of the Bureau of Meteorology’s IT team for allegedly running an operation in which they made use of the Bureau’s powerful computers to “mine” cryptocurrencies.

It was revealed late last week that the AFP raided the Bureau’s Melbourne CBD offices on February 28, and questioned the two employees. No charges have been laid, or arrests made.

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Cybersecurity vulnerability revealed after NSW Government agency’s 49-day hack

By Cameron Abbott and Harry Crawford

The NSW Government’s vulnerability to hacking has been exposed in a report by state’s auditor-general, in which it was revealed that one government agency took 49 days to shut down a hack.

This hack started with an email account of the unnamed agency being compromised and used to send out “phishing” emails to get the credentials of finance staff members. By day 20, 300 staff had clicked on the bogus link in the phishing email. 200 email accounts ended up being under the control of the hackers.

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Cybercrime most costly to financial services

By Cameron Abbott and Keely O’Dowd

A study by Accenture and Ponemon Institute – Cost of Cyber Crime Study: Insights on the security investments that make a difference – found cyberattacks cost financial service firms more to address and contain than in any other industry. The rate of breaches in the industry has tripled in the past five years. On average, the cost of cybercrime for financial services companies globally has increased by more than 40% over the past three years, from $12.97 million per firm in 2014 to $18.28 million in 2017.

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Hackers target cryptocurrency via Tesla’s public cloud: don’t mine our business – mind your own business!

By Cameron Abbott and Samantha Tyrrell

Not even Tesla is immune to digital security breaches according to a recent report published by RedLock. The cloud security firm discovered that intruders were able to access and exploit Tesla’s public cloud system to mine cryptocurrencies, a scheme – which due to its surge in popularity – is now better known as cryptojacking. A recent string of similar incidents has demonstrated that hackers are shifting their focus away from siphoning data to siphoning cloud resources instead.

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Mandatory Data Breach Reporting in 60 seconds

By Cameron Abbott

The notifiable data breach scheme, as outlined in the Privacy Amendment (Notifiable Data Breaches) Act 2017 (Cth), commenced yesterday, 22 February. Under this new scheme, in the event an organisation experiences a data breach that is likely to result in serious harm to any individual, that organisation will be required to notify the Australian Information Commissioner and any affected individual(s) of the breach. This 60 second video will help you prepare your organisation for these changes.

 

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