Dissent

Russian blogger uncovers a treasure trove of police records at an abandoned station in Moscow

 Posted by at 5:34 pm  Exposure, Government Sector, Non-U.S., Paper
Aug 202018
 

Meduza reports:

On August 16, blogger Lana Sator, a self-described “urbex [urban exploration] tourist” published photographs from an abandoned building on Bolshaya Cheremushkinskaya Street, which once housed a police station and office of the (now dissolved) Federal Migration Service. Sator says she crawled into the two-story building through an open window. The building was unguarded and the gate in the fence surrounding the site was unlocked.

“Observing the protections on personal data with all their hearts!” Sator wrote sarcastically on social media. “There are cubic meters of documents abandoned in this building: applications with copies of various certificates, boxes with Muscovites’ IDs and passports, criminal and misdemeanor case files, juvenile delinquents’ records, officers’ personnel files, and more.”

Read more on Meduza and take a look at the photographs of what she found.

How K–12 School Districts Can Best Prepare for Ransomware Recovery

 Posted by at 5:14 pm  Commentaries and Analyses, Education Sector, Malware
Aug 202018
 

Karen Scarfone reports:

No matter how many layers of security school districts put in place to stop ransomware, it’s inevitable that, at some point, an endpoint will be infected. Since January 2016, there have been 355 cybersecurity-related incidents against K–12 schools, including ransomware attacks, according to the K–12 Cybersecurity Resource Center.

In 2016, 60 percent of K–12 schools hit with ransomware decided to pay attackers in order to get back control of their data, according to analysis from the Department of Education. In response, the Education Department has responded with a number of resources to encourage better cybersecurity practices.

Most recently, the Education Department announced it would strip any K–12 school district or higher education institution of Title IV funding if it did not adhere to “reasonable methods” to protect student data.

Read more on EdTech.

NHS trusts lost or misplaced 9,100 patient records last year

 Posted by at 11:40 am  Commentaries and Analyses, Health Data, Non-U.S.
Aug 202018
 

The Commentator reports:

The National Health Service (NHS) has lost almost 10,000 patient records in the last year, according to new research from leading tech think tank Parliament Street. The findings are disclosed in a new report entitled ‘NHS Data Security: Protecting Patient Records’ examines the amount of patient records that have been misplaced from NHS trusts in the last year. The report discovered that overall, 9,132 patient records from 68 hospitals had been reported missing or lost in the last financial year.

Researchers discovered that there were 3,179 records missing or stolen was the University Hospital Birmingham, followed closely by Bolton NHS trust at 2,163 records misplaced. The third largest was University Hospital Bristol with 1,105 records lost.

Read more on The Commentator.

Twitch Glitch Exposed Some Users’ Private Messages

 Posted by at 7:50 am  Business Sector, Exposure
Aug 202018
 

Catalin Cimpanu reports:

Twitch is warning users of a bug in one of its recently retired features that may have exposed some of their messages to other users.

“On May 5, 2018, Twitch removed a legacy feature called Messages and provided  users the ability to download an archive of past messages,” the game streaming company informed users via emails last week.

“Due to a bug in the code that generated the message archive files, which we have since fixed, a small percentage of messages were included in the wrong archives,” Twitch added. “As a result, some users who downloaded their message bundle may have one or more of your messages in their archive.”

Read more on BleepingComputer.

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