Greek Bank Cyber Attacks
Recently, several Greek banks were hit with a cyber attack that brought their systems to a halt for several hours. The hackers, claiming to be a group called the Armada Collective, demanded a bitcoin ransom be paid by Monday evening. The banks refused to pay, however, which caused the group to extend the deadline before unleashing another attack.
ModPOS on the Rise
As we enter the holiday season, a new point-of-sale malware is targeting major national retailers. The malware, named ModPOS, appears to be more advanced than previous POS infections, by using multiple different components to gather as much data as possible and encryption to hide it’s tracks. Fortunately for consumers, many retailers already use point-to-point encryption for payments, with many more expected to follow in the coming months.
Read More: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-modpos-malware-20151125-story.html
Office of Personnel Management Hacked
In the past several months, it has become clear that Chinese hackers gained access to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and exposed the data of over 20 million federal employees and their families. The Chinese government has stated that they captured the hackers responsible for the attacks, though these reports are still unconfirmed.
VTech Hack
With high tech toys becoming more prevalant, the risks of children becoming victims of cyber attacks increases as well. The latest breach comes from Hong Kong based toy company, VTech, whose servers were attacked and lead to the exposure of nearly 5 million customers’ data. The hacker, who has remained anonymous, was able to access nearly 200GB of pictures, chat logs between parents and children, and usernames/passwords for those accounts.
Security in the Health Industry
For quite a while now, most healthcare facilities have lacked the infrastructure for increasing their data security, and simply allowing employees access to most data with a username/password. This has recently changed, and now many hospitals across the U.S. are adding two-factor authentication to their security protocols. This boost in security, along with additional training for employees will decrease the chances of a data breach in the future.
