Change Healthcare says it has notified approximately 100 million Americans that their personal, financial and healthcare records may have been stolen in a February 2024 ransomware attack that caused the largest ever known data breach of protected health information.
Not long ago, the ability to remotely track someone’s daily movements just by knowing their home address, employer, or place of worship was considered a powerful surveillance tool that should only be in the purview of nation states. But a new lawsuit in a likely constitutional battle over a New Jersey privacy law shows that anyone can now access this capability, thanks to a proliferation of commercial services that hoover up the digital exhaust emitted by widely-used mobile apps and websites.
Identity thieves have been exploiting a glaring security weakness in the website of Experian, one of the big three consumer credit reporting bureaus. Normally, Experian requires that those seeking a copy of their credit report successfully answer several multiple choice questions about their financial history. But until the end of 2022, Experian’s website allowed anyone to bypass these questions and go straight to the consumer’s report. All that was needed was the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number.
Some of more tech-savvy Democrats in the U.S. Senate are asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate identity-proofing company ID.me for “deceptive statements” the company and its founder allegedly made over how they handle facial recognition data collected on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service, which until recently required anyone seeking a new IRS account online to provide a live video selfie to ID.me.
On Tuesday, KrebsOnSecurity warned that hackers increasingly are using compromised government and police department email accounts to obtain sensitive customer data from mobile providers, ISPs and social media companies. Today, one of the U.S. Senate’s most tech-savvy lawmakers said he was troubled by the report and is now asking technology companies and federal agencies for information about the frequency of such schemes.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said Monday that taxpayers are no longer required to provide facial scans to create an account online at irs.gov. In lieu of providing biometric data, taxpayers can now opt for a live video interview with ID.me, the privately-held Virginia company that runs the agency’s identity proofing system. The IRS also said any biometric data already shared with ID.me would be permanently deleted over the next few weeks, and any biometric data provided for new signups will be destroyed after an account is created.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said today it will be transitioning away from requiring biometric data from taxpayers who wish to access their records at the agency’s website. The reversal comes as privacy experts and lawmakers have been pushing the IRS and other federal agencies to find less intrusive methods for validating one’s identity with the U.S. government online.
“We must care as much about securing our systems as we care about running them if we are to make the necessary revolutionary change.” -CIA’s Wikileaks Task Force.
So ends a key section of a report the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency produced in the wake of a mammoth data breach in 2016 that led to Wikileaks publishing thousands of classified documents stolen from the agency’s offensive cyber operations division. The analysis highlights a shocking series of security failures at one of the world’s most secretive organizations, but the underlying weaknesses that gave rise to the breach also unfortunately are all too common in many organizations today.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today proposed fines of more than $200 million against the nation’s four largest wireless carriers for selling access to their customers’ location information without taking adequate precautions to prevent unauthorized access to that data. While the fines would be among the largest the FCC has ever levied, critics say the penalties don’t go far enough to deter wireless carriers from continuing to sell customer location data.
The U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) said today companies can offer discounted cybersecurity services to political campaigns without running afoul of existing campaign finance laws, provided they already do the same for other non-political entities. The decision comes amid much jostling on Capitol Hill over election security at the state level, and fresh warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies about impending cyber attacks targeting candidates in the lead up to the 2020 election.
