A federal jury last week awarded a Minneapolis policewoman $585,000 after determining that fellow city employees, including other law enforcement officers, repeatedly accessed her DMV records without any legal justification. Officer Amy Krekelberg originally filed suit in a Minnesota federal district court in 2013, alleging multiple violations of the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act from 2009…
An ongoing email-based phishing scam is attempting to fool recipients into opening malicious attachments disguised as notifications from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in a warning posted on the official US-CERT web site this past Tuesday. “The email campaign uses a spoofed email address to…
Oregon’s Department of Human Services (DHS) is in the process of mailing notifications to roughly 645,000 of its reportedly 1.6 million clients, following a data breach incident last January that resulted from a phishing scam. When DHS first publicly disclosed the incident last March, it said the number of affected Oregonians exceeded 350,000, but it…
Fourth Amendment protections should apply to personal data in a car’s Event Data Recorder, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will argue before the Georgia Supreme Court today. The state’s high court is hearing oral arguments in Mobley v. State, which challenges law enforcement’s warrantless search and seizure of data gleaned from the so-called blackbox…
Iran is reportedly claiming that it successfully uprooted a CIA-led cyberespionage operation and arrested several U.S. spies in the process. “One of the most complicated CIA cyberespionage networks that had an important role in the CIA’s operations in different countries was exposed by the Iranian intelligence agencies a while ago and was dismantled,” said Ali…
One day after announcing Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, as its keynoter, organizers of the 2019 Black Hat security conference promptly revoked the invitation. “Black Hat has chosen to remove U.S. Representative Will Hurd, as our 2019 Black Hat USA keynote,” conference leadership said in a statement posted on the event’s website. “We misjudged the separation of technology and politics. We…
After Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, U.S. military and intelligence ramped up a secret program that inserted malware into the nation-state’s power grid, but didn’t brief President Trump over concerns that he might shutter the program or leak information about it to foreign governments, according to a new report. The effort “has gotten…
The U.S. House of Representatives yesterday passed its own version of the DHS Cyber Incident Response Teams Act of 2019, which would require the Department of Homeland Security to permanently maintain cyber hunt and incident response teams that help prevent and mitigate attacks on federal agencies and the private sector. Designated H.R.1158, the bill serves…
Photos of travelers and vehicles crossing U.S. borders were taken from a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) subcontractor through a cyberattack, the agency said Monday. “CBP learned that a subcontractor, in violation of CBP policies and without CBP’s authorization or knowledge, had transferred copies of license plate images and traveler images collected by CBP to…
A newly discovered malicious backdoor by the name of Hawkball was recently observed in a campaign apparently targeting one or more Russian-speaking government entities in Central Asia, according to a blog post this week from FireEye Labs. Upon successful infection, Hawkball offers the unidentified attackers a range of malicious capabilities, writes FireEye blog post author…
