The new CSC report warns that national cyber defense is "stalling" in most areas and "slipping" in some. Its central point of criticism is that only 35% of 82 recommendations that the commission made in 2020 have been fully implemented, with about 13% still facing barriers to progress and another 18% making progress but still distant from actual implementation.
Cyber Security
Cyber criminals, state-sponsored hackers and even the occasional disgruntled employee are constantly looking to gain unauthorized access for a variety of purposes: theft of money, cyber espionage, personal information for sale or for use in scams, and damage to critical infrastructure for just a few of the most common.
So how does an organization mitigate an entire world full of continual cyber attacks? Just as buildings have a number of necessary elements of physical security: access control, cameras, alarms and so on; there are similar key elements of cyber security that are absolutely vital for just about any modern business.
It starts with identifying and closing the most common doors that attackers use. For example, phishing attacks on employees are far and away the most common initial point of entry. The breach of even a low-level employee account can quickly turn into an escalation in access privileges and the ability to reach sensitive information. This is also true of smart devices, which are generally more poorly secured than computers and phones.
Credit rating agency Experian's Netherlands branch has been assessed a €2.7 million (about $3.2 million) GDPR fine for improper collection of personal data, which was drawn from multiple public and private sources that data subjects were not necessarily aware of.
Europol has dismantled a large-scale SIM farm operation, arresting seven suspects and seizing 1,200 SIM-box devices containing 40,000 SIM cards registered across 80 countries.
Popular lending platform Prosper Marketplace has disclosed a significant data breach that leaked the sensitive personal and financial information of more than 17.6 million people.
International auction house Sotheby’s has disclosed a data breach that leaked sensitive personal details, including financial information and Social Security Numbers.
The AWS outage that caused widespread global disruption for about half of Monday has officially been resolved, but numerous lingering issues remain that could take days or even weeks to fully resolve.
The U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined outsourcing firm Capita £14 million ($18.8M) for its alleged failure to prevent a data breach that compromised the personal information of millions of people.
Spanish multinational fashion retailer MANGO has recently experienced a third-party data breach that exposed customer information from a marketing partner.
F5 has disclosed that an August breach exposed source code and customer data to what it calls "nation-state hackers." The company has not made an official attribution, but third-party security researcher sources are linking the attack to China's UNC5221.
A data breach affecting American medical imaging provider SimonMed Imaging has leaked the personal information of 1.2 million people. SimonMed learned of the data breach on January 7 after a third-party vendor reported malicious activity on its network.










