IT Security Expert Blog: Cyber Security Roundup for July 2017

Apologises for the delay in this month's Cyber Security Roundup release, I been away on holiday and taking a breach for monitor screens and keyboards for a couple of weeks.

The insider threat danger manifested at Bupa where an employee stole and shared 108,000 customer health insurance records. Bupa dismissed the employee and is planning to take legal action. The Bupa data breach was reported both to the FCA and the ICO, it remains to be seen if the UK government bodies will apportion any blame onto Bupa for the data loss.

The AA was heavily criticised after it attempted to downplay a data compromise of over 13 gigabytes of its data, which included 117,000 customer records. The AA’s huge data cache was incorrectly made available online after an AA online shop server was “misconfigured” to share confidential data backup files.

A customer databreach for the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) should serve as a stark warning for businesses to adequately assure third parties and to secure hosted cloud systems. Three million WWE fan records were compromised after a third party misconfigured a cloud hosted Amazon server used by the WWE online shop.

The aftershock of Peyta \ NotPeyta rumbles on with, with malware still reported as disrupting firms weeks after the attack. There there are claims the mass media coverage of the attack have improved overall staff cyber security awareness.

It was found that over 1.6 million NHS patient records were illegally provided to Google's artificial intelligence arm, DeepMind, without patient concern meant the NHS and Google have breached the Data Protection Act.

A 29 year old British hacker named as Daniel K, but better known by his hacker handle "BestBuy" or "Popopret" admitted to hijack of 900,000 Deutsche Telekom routers in Germany after he was arrested at Luton airport in February. He said he made "the worst mistake of my life" when he carried out a failed attack in November for a Liberian client who paid him 8,500 Euros to attack the Liberian's business competitors. BestBuy used a variant of the Mirai malware to take advantage of a security vulnerability in Zyxel and Speedport model routers which were used by Germany Internet Service provider, with his intention to increase his botnet, and so the scale of DDoS attacks he could perform on behalf of clients.

A document from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) was obtained by Motherboard and was verified by the BBC with NCSC as being legitimate. The document states some industrial software companies in the UK are "likely to have been compromised" by hackers, which is reportedly produced by the British spy agency GCHQ. The NCSC report discusses the threat to the energy and manufacturing sectors. It also cites connections from multiple UK internet addresses to systems associated with "advanced state-sponsored hostile threat actors" as evidence of hackers targeting energy and manufacturing organisations.

UniCredit Bank had over 400,000 customer loan accounts accessed through a third party. This is the second security breach at the Italian bank in a year.

Finally this blog was awarded with the Best Technology Blogs of 2017 by Market Inspector and by Feedspot this month.

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