WEEK OF APRIL 25, 2022
SuperCare Health faces lawsuits over data breach
- An American respiratory care provider is facing multiple lawsuits over a data breach that allegedly exposed the personal information of more than 300,000 current and former patients.
- SuperCare Health, headquartered in Downey, California, began notifying patients of a data security incident in late March.
- According to a notice on the healthcare provider’s website, SuperCare Health discovered unauthorized activity on its systems on July 27 2021.
- Data that may have been exposed in the security incident varied depending on the individual, but may have included name, address, date of birth, hospital or medical group, patient account number, medical record number, health insurance information, testing/diagnostic/treatment information, other health-related information and claim information.
Local municipality still struggling to recover from ‘cyber security incident’
- Elgin County officials and politicians remain tight-lipped about the cyber disruption that’s rendered its government website and email system inactive for weeks, but say they’re optimistic it will be back online soon.
- The county’s website and email remained down Tuesday, nearly three weeks after officials said in an internal memo an outside consultant had been hired to help solve a “cyber security incident.”
- In the March 31 memo, the county’s top administrator said officials were concerned about “a very large amount of spam” sent to staff. Officials were working with an external consultant to determine the cause of the issue, the memo stated, adding Elgin has cyber security insurance and is working with an insurance adjuster.
Wawa sues Mastercard over data breach penalties
- Pennsylvania-based convenience store and gas station chain Wawa is seeking the return of penalties it paid to Mastercard following a 2019 data breach of its customer payment security systems.
- In December 2019, Wawa CEO Chris Gheysens announced that malware that steals credit card information had potentially been operating at Wawa’s 842 locations across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Washington, DC and Florida since March.
- Last year, Wawa turned over $10.7m to the payment-card network in connection with the security incident. In a suit filed on Monday in federal court in New York, Wawa claimed that the penalties it paid were unlawful.
Sunwing deals with delays for third day, blames cyber breach
- A technical problem at Sunwing Airlines that continues to ground flights is being blamed on a data security breach at the company’s third-party provider.
- “A system that is up and running all the time, which never fails, was hacked,” said Sunwing President Mark Williams. “They had a cyber-breach and they’ve been unable to get the system up.”
- As a result, the company has been forced to check-in passengers manually, causing significant delays at airports across Canada as well as in sun destinations.
- Amid the chaos, those affected by the outage have been left with little information about when this might be resolved.
Hackers claim to target Russian institutions in barrage of cyberattacks and leaks
- Hackers claim to have broken into dozens of Russian institutions over the past two months, including the Kremlin’s internet censor and one of its primary intelligence services, leaking emails and internal documents to the public in an apparent hack-and-leak campaign that is remarkable in its scope.
- The hacking operation comes as the Ukrainian government appears to have begun a parallel effort to punish Russia by publishing the names of supposed Russian soldiers who operated in Bucha, the site of a massacre of civilians, and agents of the F.S.B., a major Russian intelligence agency, along with identifying information like dates of birth and passport numbers.
- Much of the data released by the hackers and the Ukrainian government is by its nature impossible to verify. As an intelligence agency, the F.S.B. would never confirm a list of its officers. Even the groups distributing the data have warned that the files swiped from Russian institutions could contain malware, manipulated or faked information, and other tripwires.
FBI warns ransomware attacks on agriculture co-ops could upend food supply chain
- Ransomware groups are looking to strike large agriculture cooperatives during strategic seasons, when they are most vulnerable, according to law enforcement.
- A new advisory details previous attempts by threat actors since 2021 to disrupt agricultural co-op operations, including a Lockbit 2.0 attack on a critical farming supplier, and a July 2021 breach of a business management software company serving several agricultural cooperatives. Some of the attacks were successful and resulted in a production slowdown, the FBI says.
- Another successful attack could affect the entire food chain, the alert warns.