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Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Payment Card Breaches, Encryption Debate, and Breach Notification Laws

This past week saw the announcement of several new payment card breaches, including a point-of-sale breach at Applebee’s restaurants that affected 167 locations across 15 states.

The malware, which was discovered on February 13, 2018, was “designed to capture payment card information and may have affected a limited number of purchases” made at Applebee’s locations owned by RMH Franchise Holdings, the company said in a statement.

News outlets reported many of the affected locations had their systems infected between early December 2017 and early January 2018. Applebee’s has close to 2,000 locations around the world and 167 of them were affected by the incident.

In addition to Applebees, MenuDrive issued a breach notification to merchants saying that its desktop ordering site was injected with malware designed to capture payment card information. The incident impacted certain transactions from November 5, 2017 to November 28, 2017.

“We have learned that the malware was contained to ONLY the Desktop ordering site of the version that you are using and certain payment gateways,” the company wrote. “Thus, this incident was contained to a part of our system and did NOT impact the Mobile ordering site or any other MenuDrive versions.”

Finally, there is yet another breach notification related to Sabre Hospitality Solutions’ SynXis Central Reservations System — this time affecting Preferred Hotels & Resorts. Sabre said that a unauthorized individual used compromised user credentials to view reservation information, including payment card information, for a subset of hotel reservations that Sabre processed on behalf of the company between June 2016 and November 2017.

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Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

  • Marijuana businesses targeted: MJ Freeway Business Solutions, which provides business management software to cannabis dispensaries, is notifying customers of unauthorized access to its systems that may have led to personal information being stolen. The Canadian medical marijuana delivery service JJ Meds said that it received an extortion threat demanding $1,000 in bitcoin in order to prevent a leak of customer information.
  • Healthcare breach notifications: The Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services said that the personal information of 11,000 people was improperly emailed to local contractors by a now-fired employee. Front Range Dermatology Associates announced a breach related to a now-fired employee providing patient information to a former employee. Investigators said two Florida Hospital employees stole patient records, and local news reported that 9,000 individuals may have been impacted by the theft.
  • Notable data breaches: Ventiv Technology, which provides workers’ compensation claim management software solutions, is notifying customers of a compromise of employee email accounts that were hosted on Office365 and contained personal information. Catawba County services employees had their personal information compromised due to the payroll and human resources system being infected with malware. Flexible Benefit Service Corporation said that an employee email account was compromised and used to search for wire payment information. A flaw in Nike’s website allowed attackers to read server data and could have been leveraged to gain greater access to the company’s systems. A researcher claimed that airline Emirates is leaking customer data.
  • Other notable events: Cary E. Williams CPA is notifying employees, shareholders, trustees and partners of a ransomware attack that led to unauthorized access to its systems. The cryptocurrency exchange Binance said that its users were the target of “a large scale phishing and stealing attempt” and those compromised accounts were used to perform abnormal trading activity over a short period of time. The spyware company Retina-X Studios said that it “is immediately and indefinitely halting its PhoneSheriff, TeenShield, SniperSpy and Mobile Spy products” after being “the victim of sophisticated and repeated illegal hackings.”

SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past week. Some of the top trending targets are shown in the chart below.

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Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

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There were several regulatory stories that made headlines this week, including the FBI’s continued push for a stronger partnership with the private sector when it comes to encryption, allegations that Geek Squad techs act as FBI spies, and new data breach notification laws.

In a keynote address at Boston College’s cybersecurity summit, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that there were 7,775 devices that the FBI could not access due to encryption in fiscal 2017, despite having approval from a judge. According to Fry, that meant the FBI could not access more than half of the devices they tried to access during the period.

“Let me be clear: the FBI supports information security measures, including strong encryption,” Fry said. “Actually, the FBI is on the front line fighting cyber crime and economic espionage. But information security programs need to be thoughtfully designed so they don’t undermine the lawful tools we need to keep the American people safe.”

However, Ars Technica noted that a consensus of technical experts has said that what the FBI has asked for is impossible.

In addition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained documents via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that revealed the FBI and Best Buy’s Geek Squad have been working together for decades. In some cases Geek Squad techs were paid as much as $1,000 to be informants, which the EFF argued was a violation of Fourth Amendment rights as the computer searches were not authorized by their owners.

Finally, the Alabama senate unanimously passed the Alabama Breach Notification Act, and the bill will now move to the house.

“Alabama is one of two states that doesn’t have a data breach notification law,” said state Senator Arthur Orr, who sponsored Alabama’s bill. “In the case of a breach, businesses and organizations, including state government, are under no obligation to tell a person their information may have been compromised.”

With both Alabama and South Dakota recently introducing data breach notification legislation, every resident of the U.S. may soon be protected by a state breach notification law.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from SurfWatch Labs, Inc. authored by Jeff Peters. Read the original post at: https://blog.surfwatchlabs.com/2018/03/10/weekly-cyber-risk-roundup-payment-card-breaches-encryption-debate-and-breach-notification-laws/