data breach

Third Party Leak Exposes Info on 123 Million US Households

A massive and potentially damaging data leak has exposed sensitive and detailed consumer profiles on nearly every American household, the security firm UpGuard Security said on Tuesday. 

US Firms May Be Early GDPR Targets

Large US firms may be among the first targets of EU regulators once the General Data Protection Rule goes into effect. (Editor’s Note: this blog post first appeared on Digital Guardian’s Digital Insider blog. You can read the full post here. )

Equifax says breach cost it $87m

Data broker Equifax said that the data breach that spilled information on some 140 million individuals has cost the company $87 million so far, with more costs likely in the future. The disclosure, made as part of the company’s quarterly filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, is the first public disclosure of the direct costs of the incident, which saw the company’s stock price plunge by more than 30% and wiped out billions of dollars in value to shareholders. Equifax said that it recorded $87.5 million in expense related to the cybersecurity incident in the third quarter of 2017. But its worth digging into that number to sort out real from anticipated costs. Around $55.5m of the $87.5m in breach related costs stems from Product costs. Professional fees added up to another $17.1m for Equifax and consumer support costs totaled $14.9m, the company said. Equifax also said it […]

Hacker Eye on the Consultant Guy: Deloitte and the Art of spotting Vulnerable Firms from the Outside

In the latest Security Ledger podcast, we analyze the breach of Deloitte by talking to two people who spend a lot of time judging the security of firms by how they look to the outside world. Dan Tentler of the firm Phobos Group tells us what he found out about Deloitte doing some fast and dirty open source research. Also: we talk to Stephen Boyer of the firm BitSight about a new study that firm did of the gap between the security readiness of financial services firms and the third-party software supply chain they rely on. 

Report: 1.9b Records Lost in First Half of 2017, topping 2016

A survey of public data breaches has found a large increase in the number of records that have been stolen, lost or compromised in the first six months of 2017. The firm Gemalto said that the number of records caught up in breaches jumped 164% from the second half of 2016 and the first half 2017 to almost 2 billion lost records. That is more than the total number of records lost in all of 2016.  Gemalto said its latest data from the company’s Breach Level Index, a global database of public data breaches, indicates 918 data breaches led to 1.9 billion data records being compromised worldwide in the first half of 2017. Most of the leaked records came from just 22 large data breaches, each involving more than one million compromised records, the company said. How many records? Nobody knows. Even more worrying: of the 918 data breaches, the […]