The top six takeaways for corporate data privacy compliance

For nearly two months, Malwarebytes Labs has led readers on a journey through data privacy laws around the world, exploring the nuances between “personal information” and “personal data,” as well as between data breach notification laws in Florida, Utah, California, and Iowa. We explored the risk...

Ladders, SkyMed Leak Employment, Medical Data for Millions

Cloud storage misconfigurations continue to plague the data-privacy space, as evidenced by the new discovery of employment and health information for millions exposed on the web, wide open to any internet passerby. Two misconfigured cloud databases inadvertently leaked personally identifiable...

Why Isn't GDPR Being Enforced?

Politico has a long article making the case that the lead GDPR regulator, Ireland, has too cozy a relationship with Silicon Valley tech companies to effectively regulate their privacy practices. Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of caterin...

Updates for Microsoft 365 help strengthen data privacy

As data continues to grow exponentially and travel across organizational boundaries, privacy and compliance professionals play an increasingly strategic role within organizations. Several updates—announced today—for Microsoft 365 provide organizations with more control and options to strengthen...

News Wrap: Amazon Echo Privacy, Facebook FTC Fines and Biometrics Regulation

Data privacy has been an outstanding theme this past week, and the Threatpost team discussed the biggest privacy related news. In the news wrap podcast for April 26, the team discussed the backstories behind several reports from the week, including: Facebook potentially facing Federal Trade...

Labs Cybercrime Tactics and Techniques report finds businesses hit with 235 percent more threats in Q1

The Malwarebytes Labs Cybercrime Tactics and Techniques Q1 2019 report found businesses at the butt end of a bad joke. In just one year, threats aimed at corporate targets have increased by 235 percent, with Trojans, such as Emotet, and ransomware in particular revving up in the first quarter...

Facebook May Face $5 Billion FTC Fine for Data Misuse

UPDATE Facebook may be facing fines as high as $5 billion after a year-long Federal Trade Commission FTC investigation into its data-security practices. Though it wasn’t mentioned in its earnings call on Wednesday, the social-media giant in a release for its Q1 2019 earnings said that it was...

Maintaining Privacy in the Cloud [Podcast Discussion]

Not long ago I joined Brian Contos, CISO and VP of Product Innovation at Verodin, for one of his Verodin Cybersecurity Effectiveness Podcasts. It’s been about 10 years since I worked with Brian at Imperva when he was the Chief Security Strategist. Back then, he was the one traveling the world,...

Facebook Stored Millions of Instagram Users' Passwords in Plaintext

Facebook late last month revealed that the social media company mistakenly stored passwords for "hundreds of millions" of Facebook users in plaintext, including "tens of thousands" passwords of its Instagram users as well. Now it appears that the incident is far worse than first reported. Faceboo...

Over 100 Million JustDial Users' Personal Data Found Exposed On the Internet

An unprotected database belonging to JustDial, India's largest local search service, is leaking personally identifiable information of its every customer in real-time who accessed the service via its website, mobile app, or even by calling on its fancy "88888 88888" customer care number, The Hack...

What is personal information? In legal terms, it depends

In early March, cybersecurity professionals around the world filled the San Francisco Moscone Convention Center’s sprawling exhibition halls to discuss and learn about everything infosec, from public key encryption to incident response, and from machine learning to domestic abuse. It was RSA...

Ancestry: On the Vanguard of DevOps Security

Grant Johnson, Ancestry's Director, Risk & Compliance This is a guest post by Grant Johnson, Director, Risk & Compliance at Ancestry Over the past two years, Ancestry moved its entire applications and data infrastructure from local data centers to Amazon’s cloud, and this required a new approach...

Who is managing the security of medical management apps?

One truth that is consistent across every sector—be it technology or education—is that software is vulnerable, which means that any device running software applications is also at risk. While virtually any application-running device could be compromised by an attacker, vulnerabilities in medical...

A week in security (April 1 – 7)

Last week, Malwarebytes Labs took readers on a brief tour of some of the world's most notable data privacy laws, explored how gamers can protect themselves against cyberthreats, and offered thoughts about the reports that a 23-year-old Chinese woman gained access to President Donald Trump’s...

The global data privacy roadmap: a question of risk

For most American businesses, complying with US data privacy laws follows a somewhat linear, albeit lengthy, path. Set up a privacy policy, don’t lie to the consumer, and check the specific rules if you’re a health care provider, video streaming company, or kids’ app maker. For American businesse...

A week in security (March 25 – 31)

Last week, we looked at plugin vulnerabilities, location tracking app problems, and talked about plain text password woes. We also looked at federal data privacy regulation and took a deep dive into BatMobi Adware. Other cybersecurity news Poisoned software update headache for ASUS Source: The...

US Congress proposes comprehensive federal data privacy legislation—finally

The United States might be the only country of its size—both in economy and population—to lack a comprehensive data privacy law protecting its citizens’ online lives. That could change this year. Never-ending cybersecurity breaches, recently-enacted international privacy laws, public outrage, and...

Grindr Poses National Security Risk, U.S. Gov Says

UPDATE The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States CFIUS has named the ownership of popular gay dating app Grindr a national security risk, according to a report. Grindr describes itself as “the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” A...

Are hackers gonna hack anymore? Not if we keep reusing passwords

Enterprises have a password problem, and it’s one that is making the work of hackers a lot easier. From credential stuffing to brute force and password spraying attacks, modern hackers don’t have to do much hacking in order to compromise internal corporate networks. Instead, they log in using wea...

A week in security (March 4 – 11)

Last week, Malwarebytes Labs released its in-depth, international data privacy survey of nearly 4,000 individuals, revealing that every generation, including Millennials, cares about online privacy. We also covered a novel case of zombie email that involved a very much alive account user, delved...