Month: June 2019

The city of Riviera Beach, Florida, agreed to pay $600,000 in ransom to decrypt its data, after a ransomware attack hit its computer systems.

The City Council board authorized its insurer to pay 65 bitcoins, valued at approximately $592,000. An additional $25,000 would come out of the city budget, to cover its policy deductible. “Without discussion on the merits, the board tackled the agenda item in two minutes, voted and moved on.”

The insurance company negotiated the payment on the city’s behalf.

The attack began on May 29, 2019, when an employee at the Riviera Beach police department opened a malicious email containing a link that once clicked, has allowed infecting the PC. The ransomware quickly spread inside the city infrastructure, causing several problems. The email system was disabled, employees and vendors couldn’t be paid by direct deposit and had to be issued checks manually, and 911 dispatchers were unable to accept calls.

Read more about it here.

Millions of Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp records have been breached

American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA), a billing processor for Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, suffered a breach, compromising records of 12 million patients of Quest Diagnostics and 7.7 million records of LabCorp.

A June 3, 2019 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by Quest, and a similar June 4 SEC filing by LabCorp, revealed that between August 1, 2018 and March 30, 2019 an unauthorized user had access to AMCA’s system that contained information that AMCA had received from various entities, including Quest Diagnostics, and information that AMCA collected itself. The information on AMCA’s affected system included financial information (e.g., credit card numbers and bank account information), medical information and other personal information (e.g., Social Security Numbers).

In response to this incident, both Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp suspended sending collection requests to AMCA.

Read more about it here.

Apple’s new Find My app will find your devices even if they are offline

At the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote on on June 3, 2019, Apple executive Craig Federighi described a new location-tracking feature. The interaction is end-to-end encrypted and anonymous, even to Apple itself. The trick? You need to own at least two Apple devices.

Here is how the new system works:

• When you first set up Find My on your Apple devices, it generates a private key that is shared, communicated encrypted, among all your devices.
• Each device also generates a public key. This is the “beacon” that your devices will broadcast out via Bluetooth to nearby devices.
• That public key frequently changes, “rotates” to a new number.
• When someone steals your device, even if it is disconnected from the internet, it emits its rotating public key via Bluetooth.
• A nearby stranger’s Apple device, with no interaction from its owner, will pick up the signal, check its own location, encrypt that location data using the public key it picked up from your device, and upload to Apple’s servers.
• When you want to find your stolen device, you turn to your second Apple device, which contains both the same private key and has generated the same series of rotating public keys.
• Apple returns the encrypted location of your stolen device to your other device, which can use its private key to decrypt it and tell you the stolen device’s last known location.

Read more about it here.