4 things you didn’t know a VPN could do

By Sabrina Bucknole Until recently, many people thought of VPNs as a tool used by tech-savvy kids to anonymously download music and films. But, as concern about the use and security of personal data online continues to rise, it is no surprise that the number of people using a Virtual Private...

HSBC suffers data breach after hackers access customers’ personal data

By Uzair Amir The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation HSBC has suffered a data breach in which unknown hackers have accessed personal and financial data of its customers. The data breach, according to the notification from HSBC, took between October 4, 2018, and October 14, 2018. Upon...

Spam and phishing in Q3 2018

Quarterly highlights Personal data in spam We have often said that personal data is candy on a stick to fraudsters and must be kept safe that is, not given out on dubious websites. It can be used to gain access to accounts and in targeted attacks and ransomware campaigns. In Q3, we registered a...

British Airways Data Breach Takes Off Again with 185K More Victims

British Airways said that the data breach it first reported in September is larger than previously thought. It has added an additional 185,000 victims to the official tally. The airline said that hackers may have stolen personal data connected to an additional 77,000 payment cards, including name...

Cathay Pacific hit by massive data breach; 10 million passengers affected

By Waqas Hong Kong's Cathay Pacific Airways Limited has suffered a massive data breach in which personal data of 9.4 million customers has been stolen by unknown hackers. Cathay Pacific states that the stolen data includes passenger name, date of birth, nationality, email, phone number, frequent...

Adult Website Hack Exposes 1.2M ‘Wife Lover’ Fans

The database underlying an erotica site known as Wife Lovers has been hacked, making off with user information protected only by a simple-to-crack, outdated hashing technique known as the DEScrypt algorithm. Over the weekend, it came to light that Wife Lovers and seven sister sites, all similarly...

Personal data of 75,000 individuals exposed after HealthCare.gov system hack

By Waqas Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services CMS experienced a data breach leading to exposure of highly sensitive personal data of nearly 75,000 people. The CMS is a government system linked with healthCare.gov which assists insurance agents and brokers in helping people register for its...

30 Million Facebook Accounts Were Hacked: Check If You're One of Them

Late last month Facebook announced its worst-ever security breach that allowed an unknown group of hackers to steal secret access tokens for millions of accounts by taking advantage of a flaw in the 'View As' feature. At the time of the initial disclosure, Facebook estimated that the number of...

It’s Not Daddy Calling

How I found vulnerabilities that could put the safety of children in jeopardy How it started A friend recently showed me a tracker watch that he’d purchased for his son. It offered useful functionality such as two-way calling, and the accompanying app allowed him to track the location of his son...

ProConf Information Disclosure Vulnerability

ProConf is a conference management system. An information disclosure vulnerability exists in ProConf versions prior to 6.1. An attacker can exploit the vulnerability by changing the value of the Paper ID to view or gain access to submitted reports titles and abstracts and authors' personal...

T-Mobile data breach: Personal data of 2 million users stolen

By Waqas The stolen data also includes "encrypted" passwords. Another day, another T-Mobile data breach. This time, the telecommunication giant T-Mobile has announced that it has suffered a data breach in which unknown hackers have stolen personal data of 2 million customers. According to the...

Dispelling the Myths Surrounding Security Technology and GDPR

Many of our customers conducting business in Europe are concerned about how the new General Data Protection Regulation "GDPR" impacts the ability to protect their organization's data, network and IT system resources. In particular, many worry that the requirements of GDPR will restrict their...

16-Year-Old Teen Hacked Apple Servers, Stole 90GB of Secure Files

Well, there's something quite embarrassing for Apple fans. Though Apple servers are widely believed to be unhackable, a 16-year-old high school student proved that nothing is impossible. The teenager from Melbourne, Australia, managed to break into Apple servers and downloaded some 90GB of secure...

SpiderOak's Warrant Canary Died

BoingBoing has the story. I have never quite trusted the idea of a warrant canary. But here it seems to have worked. Presumably, if SpiderOak wanted to replace the warrant canary with a transparency report, they would have written something explaining their decision. To have it simply disappear i...

Dixons Carphone Data Breach Affects 10 Million Customers

Dixons Carphone's 2017 data breach was worse than initially anticipated. In an announcement on Monday, Dixons Carphone, one of the largest consumer electronics and telecommunication retailers in Europe, admitted that the breach affected around 10 million customers, up from an initial estimate of...

Popular Android/iOS apps & Extensions collecting highly personal user data

By Waqas In May this year, HackRead reported how an Israeli company Unimania was caught collecting personal, Facebook and browsing data of users through Android apps and Chrome extensions. Now, researchers have discovered another "spyware" campaign aiming at stealing personal data of users but th...

Singapore's Largest Healthcare Group Hacked, 1.5 Million Patient Records Stolen

Singapore's largest healthcare group, SingHealth, has suffered a massive data breach that allowed hackers to snatch personal information on 1.5 million patients who visited SingHealth clinics between May 2015 and July 2018. SingHealth is the largest healthcare group in Singapore with 2 tertiary...

Online generators… of dashed expectations

Quite recently, we and hence our security solutions started to designate an entire class of sites — gift card generators — as fraudulent, despite their not stealing any money or personal data from visitors. Why? Let's try to unpick these sites and see how they work. How it works Ads for all kinds...

Expanded Privacy Protections Granted to California Residents: The California Consumer Protection Act

In late June, California passed a new consumer privacy law--the California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA. This statute provides protections to California residents; but it will also have wide-ranging effects outside of California as it will apply to organizations that conduct business in California...

Timehop Breach Impacts Personal Data of 21 Million Users

The personal data of millions of Timehop customers has been compromised after a hacker gained access to its cloud-based backend computing environment. Timehop, a service that plugs into users’ social media platforms and shows them memories from the past, disclosed the data breach on Sunday. The...