WEEK OF FEBRUARY 07, 2022

DHS launches cyber safety review board to analyze major vulnerability events

• The US Department of Homeland Security has named a 15-member review board to assess significant cybersecurity events and recommend improvements – starting with the Log4J vulnerability.
• The CSRB, whose creation was mandated by the Biden administration’s Executive Order 14028 issued last May, is tasked with reviewing and assessing “significant cybersecurity events so that government, industry, and the broader security community can better protect our nation’s networks and infrastructure,” the DHS states.
• Initially, the panel will investigate the industry, community and government response to the vulnerabilities found in the Log4j software library in December 2021.

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Official Beijing 2022 Olympics mobile app is marred by security flaws, researchers say

• Compulsory software potentially exposes sensitive personal data from athletes, officials and others, according to Citizen Lab.
• The China-built app, My 2022, will be used to monitor the health of attendees, as well as facilitate information sharing, leading up to and throughout the 2022 Games.
• Technicians with Citizen Lab, a human-rights-focused cybersecurity and censorship research group at the University of Toronto, said they found the app failed to authenticate the identity of certain websites, leaving transfers of personal data open to attackers.

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Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp hit by cyber attack

• Wall Street Journal owner suspects incident was intended to benefit the interests of China.
• “We appear to have been the target of persistent nation-state attack activity that affected a limited number of our employees,” according to an email sent to News Corp staff and viewed by the Financial Times.
• The people behind the attack “are likely involved in espionage activities to collect intelligence to benefit China’s interests”, News Corp’s chief technology officer, David Kline, said in the internal email.
• The company discovered the breach on January 20 and said the hackers accessed documents from News Corp headquarters, Dow Jones, News UK and the New York Post. It hired Mandiant, a cyber security company, to investigate.

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Shell re-routes oil supplies after cyberattack on German firm

• The companies, Oiltanking GmbH Group and mineral oil dealer Mabanaft GmbH & Co. KG Group, on Jan. 29 discovered they were hit by an attack that disrupted its IT systems and supply chain, the companies said in a joint statement.
• Shell Deutschland GmbH, the oil major’s German subsidiary, was able to “re-route to alternative supply depots for the time being,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
• In their joint statement, Oiltanking and Mabanaft said they were working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and to understand its full scope.
• “We are undertaking a thorough investigation, together with external specialists and are collaborating closely with the relevant authorities. All terminals continue to operate safely,” the statement said.

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Hackers have stolen $80 million in cryptocurrency from the Qubit DeFi platform

• The hack exploited a flaw in the smart contract code used in an Ethereum bridge.
• The value of cryptocurrency stolen makes this the largest hack of 2022 so far.
• Qubit Finance acknowledge the hack in an incident report published through Medium. According to the report, the hack occurred at around 5PM ET on the evening of January 27th.
• Qubit provides a service known as a “bridge” between different blockchains, effectively meaning that deposits made in one cryptocurrency can be withdrawn in another. Qubit Finance operates a bridge between Ethereum and the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) network.

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Excellus, BCBSA reach settlement following 2015 data breach

• The data breach impacted 10.5 million individuals at the time, making it one of the largest healthcare data breaches in recent history.
• The lawsuit alleged that Excellus, BCBA, and its affiliates failed to safeguard protected health information (PHI), delayed customer breach notification for too long, and did not give customers adequate information about how they could protect themselves.
• According to the court documents, Excellus discovered the cyberattack on August 5, 2015, but it could have begun as early as December 2013. The attackers exfiltrated names, Social Security numbers, addresses, financial information, medical claims information, credit card numbers, birth dates, and names.

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