Will the Real “Year of the Data Breach” Please Stand Up?

January 04, 2018 by Tony MartinVegue in Cognitive Bias

My New Year’s Day ritual has been the same for nearly 10 years now: a late breakfast, a cup of strong coffee and a scan of security blogs and news for two things that always make me chuckle: cyber predictions for the new year, and a retrospective that declares the past year the “Year of the Data Breach.” Kelly Shortridge perfectly parodied the former and I actually thought we might go a year without the latter, until I found this headline on Bloomberg news in which 2017 is named the Year of the Data Breach.

Lessons from the Heartland Payment Systems data breach, redux

June 15, 2015 by Tony MartinVegue in Information Security

In 2009, Heartland Payment Systems suffered what was until recently the largest data breach in recorded history, at the hands of a skilled and malevolent hacker. After the attack, the company went on the offensive, implementing numerous protocols to safeguard against a future attack. And hey, lightening doesn’t strike twice, right?

The unfortunate thing about this incident is that Heartland, ever since its 2009 breach, dedicated quite a bit of effort into making sure its name wasn’t in the news again associated with a data breach. The lesson here is, while endeavoring to detect and respond to sophisticated attacks from advanced persistent threats, don’t forget the fundamentals of security.

Not all data breaches are created equal — do you know the difference?

March 17, 2015 by Tony MartinVegue in Information Security

It was one of those typical, cold February winter days in Indianapolis earlier this year. Kids woke up hoping for a snow day and old men groaned as they scraped ice off their windshields and shoveled the driveway. Those were the lucky ones, because around that same time, executives at Anthem were pulling another all-nighter, trying to wrap their heads around their latest data breach of 37.5 million records and figuring out what to do next. And, what do they do next? This was bad — very bad — and one wonders if one or more of the frenzied executives thought to him of herself, or even aloud, “At least we’re not Sony.”