It has come to light that a recent breach disclosed by Ticketmaster UK may be much larger than initially reported, with not just the company’s UK site, but also their sites for Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Turkey and even the US found to contain digital card-skimming code. Similar to the recent breach at Harvey Norman, this incident was caused by cyber criminals compromising a third-party service provider, not the site itself directly, leading security experts to believe many more websites may be at risk or have been compromised. This is part of a concerning new trend whereby cyber criminals are targeting third-party providers, who may deal with hundreds of websites, rather than attacking a website individually, exponentially increasing the damage inflicted.
Harvey Norman Among Companies Compromised in Third-Party Data Breach
Harvey Norman, the retail giant with 13 stores in the Republic and a further two stores in Northern Ireland, has admitted to customers that it suffered a data breach through a third-party tool used on its website. “We wish to alert you to a data breach that has occurred in the systems of a third-party website service provider, Typeform, which has resulted in the unauthorised access to some Harvey Norman data,” the company said earlier this week in a statement.
Harvey Norman was just one of the many companies affected by a breach at Typeform, a third-party website service provider
How to Check If Your Business or Personal Email May Have Been Compromised
It’s 2018, and cyber crime is on the rise. It seems every other week there is another data breach or cyber attack somewhere in the world, and many people are rightfully apprehensive that they may be hacked too, or even that their details may have been exposed online through a breach of a service that they use. What if your email and password were compromised in the Adobe breach in 2013, the Yahoo breach in 2016, or the LinkedIn breach in 2012? What if your email had been obtained online and sold to cyber criminals as part of a spam list, such as Exploit.In, or the Anti Public Combo List, both discovered in 2016? If so, you may be at risk of hackers gaining access to your accounts, or even committing identity fraud against you. Luckily, security researcher and Microsoft regional director Troy Hunt has developed a database so that you can check to see if you’ve been compromised – so you can secure your online presence again.
haveibeenpwned.com is a breach database run by security researcher and Microsoft regional director Troy Hunt
EU-US Data Transfer May Be Stopped As Privacy Shield Comes Under Fire
The flow of data between the United States and the EU may be at risk as tensions are rising around Privacy Shield. If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last two years, you will likely have heard of the GDPR – the EU data protection regulation that now fiercely protects EU citizen data, whether in the hands of a non-EU or EU-based organisation. You may have wondered, then, how companies in places like the US are still able to legally hold and process EU data without falling foul of the GDPR, and the answer is Privacy Shield. Privacy Shield is a framework that allows companies on both sides of the Atlantic to transfer data while complying with the GDPR. However, this may all soon change, with Members of the European Parliament calling for Privacy Shield to be brought up to scratch or invalidated.
Privacy Shield’s predecessor, Safe Harbour, was already invalidated in 2016 after it was ruled to be inadequate by the EU
How the Latest Zero-Day Flash Bug Bypasses Your Antivirus and Firewall
Adobe has been forced to release an out-of-schedule emergency security patch to its users, after a zero-day vulnerability was discovered to affect Adobe Flash Player. Users are being urged by Adobe to update to version 30.0.0.113 of Flash Player, which contains mitigations for the zero-day as well as addressing three other flaws. This latest flaw was discovered already being used in the wild to attack Windows users, and doesn’t exploit browsers like typical Flash exploits – instead, it works through Microsoft Office documents which it utilises to download and execute malicious code.
