Cyber Victor – a leading blog on cyber security

Three hospitals in Alabama and seven in Australia have been hit with paralyzing ransomware attacks that are affecting their ability to take new patients. All three hospitals that make up the DCH Health System in Alabama were closed to new patients on October 1, 2019, as officials were coping with the attack. All but critical patients were turned away.

At the same time, seven hospitals in Australia were forced to either shut down systems or go into manual operation mode, following a ransomware attache of their information systems.

Read more about it here.

Researchers at Greenbone Networks vulnerability analysis and management company analyzed 2,300 Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) systems. Of the 2,300, 590 archiving systems were accessible from the Internet, exposing 24 million medical records from 52 countries. They contained 737 million images linked to this patient data, around 400 million of which are accessible or can be easily downloaded from the internet.

Many of these servers were set up and then forgotten about, or weren’t patched regularly.

Read more about it here.

Security researcher Avinash Jain discovered more than 8,000 Google Calendars exposed online, that were indexed by the Google search engine.

The issue isn’t new, however users may not be aware of it. It occurs when users make the Google calendar public.

“While this is an intended setting by the user and intended behavior of the service,” Jain says, “the main issue here is that anyone can view any public calendar by making a single Google search query, and without the calendar link being shared with them.”

Users should review their calendar sharing options – see https://support.google.com/a/answer/60765?hl=en.

Read more about it here.

According to internet security firm vpnMentor. 20.8 million records of Ecuadorian citizens had their data exposed by an unsecured Elasticsearch server run by an Ecuadorian marketing and analytics firm.

The country’s population is only 16.6 million. Most likely, the data leakage included duplicate records and data of deceased citizens.

The personal information leaked online included full names, dates of birth, national identity card numbers, tax identification numbers, employment information, names of family members, and more.

The database was secured on September 11, 2019, after vpnMentor notified its discovery to the Ecuador CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) team.

Read more about it here.

Security researchers discovered an unsecured database containing 700,000 records from hotel franchise Choice Hotels. The MongoDB database contained 5.6 million records.

The database was hosted on a vendor’s server. Exposed records included guests names, email addresses, and phone numbers.

The hackers left a ransom note saying that 700,000 records had been stolen and backed up elsewhere, demanding 0.4 Bitcoin, or about $3,856. However, they didn’t lock up the data, making the ransom demand moot.

Read more about it here.

The city of Naples, Florida, has confirmed that is lost $700,000 following a spear phishing cyber attack. “The funds were paid to a fake bank account the attacker provided while posing as a representative from the Wright Construction Group, which was doing infrastructure work on Eighth Street South in downtown Naples”, according to a news release.

The attackers sent an email disguised as coming from the Wright Construction Group, tricking a city employee into transferring the funds to a fake bank account under their control.

Fortunately, City Manager Charles Chapman confirmed that the attack did not breach the city’s data systems.

Recently, a number of cities in Florida were victims of cyber attacks: Riviera Beach, Key Biscayne, and others.

Read more about it here.

State Farm, an American group of insurance and financial services companies, disclosed that it has been a victim of a credential stuffing attack. The attack was discovered in July 2019. The company notified the impacted users, but didn’t disclose how many users were affected.

Credential stuffing occurs when bad actors steal usernames and passwords from one online account, and then try them on other online account, revealing additional user information.

In response to the attack, State Farm reset the passwords of the impacted accounts.

Read more about it here.

In September 2017, credit bureau Equifax announced that its systems had been breached. Between mid-May and the end of July 2017, the attackers gained unauthorized access to the personal information of about 147 million U.S. consumers. This information included people’s names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and in some instances driver’s license number

Equifax has agreed to pay at least $575 million and up to $700 million to resolve consumer claims and multiple state and federal investigations stemming from the episode.

Consumers may file a claim up until January 22, 2020 and get up to $20,000, if they can prove damages.

Check whether your credit was impacted, file a claim, or read more about it here.

A hacker has stolen data from a Bulgarian government system, likely the National Revenue Agency (NRA), and sent it to local media. The hacker stole personal information of 5 million people, nearly every adult in Bulgaria, population 7 million people. The hacker bragged about stealing 110 databases from NRA’s servers, totaling nearly 21 GB. The hacker only shared 57 databases, comprising 11 GB of data, with local news outlets, but promised to release the rest in the coming days. Most of the data is very old, in some cases, information is dated back as far as 2007.

A Bulgarian CyberSecurity expert named Kristian Boykov was later arrested in connection with the data breach, and then released after his charges were downgraded.

Read more about it here.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has approved a record $5 billion settlement with Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the largest the agency has levied on a technology company. The $5 Billion are minuscule compared to the nearly $56 billion in revenue in 2018. Facebook has already set aside $3 billion aside in the first quarter of 2019, in anticipation of the settlement with the FTC.

In the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, the company was allowed to access the personal data of about 87 million Facebook users without their explicit consent. Recently the UK’s Information Commissioner Office (ICO) has also imposed a £500,000 fine on Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Facebook and investors are now concerned about further restrictions and government oversight that might come with it.

Read more about it here.