Hello. It’s been a busy few days in the cyber realm.
U.K. and U.S. officials warned hackers linked to Russia are targeting the health-care industry to go after coronavirus research. As WSJ Pro’s James Rundle reports, hospitals and researchers have been fending off a surge in attacks for months.
Wednesday’s hack on
Twitter
,
which left top accounts spewing an apparent bitcoin scam, provided a high-profile demonstration of how difficult it is to stop cyberattacks in real time. Reporter David Uberti has an analysis.
From Brussels, Catherine Stupp brings us a report about the turmoil after a European court invalidated a popular legal tool for transferring data to the U.S. Some corporate privacy leaders now have questions for
Amazon
and other cloud providers.
Don’t forget: Our Weekend Reading section rounds up cybersecurity and privacy coverage you might have missed.
Coronavirus Research in Hacker Sights
Russian hack alert shows scale of health care’s security challenge. Intelligence agencies in the U.S. and U.K. are now warning other nations are targeting health-care organizations and pharmaceutical companies with cyberattacks. But security chiefs at hospitals, research facilities and drugmakers say they have been under siege for months already.
Thursday’s alert from the National Cyber Security Centre in the U.K., backed by U.S. and Canadian agencies, was unusually direct in its attribution, blaming a hacking group linked to Russian security services. The Kremlin has refuted the allegations.
Vicky Imber, head of security for Swiss pharmaceutical firm
Roche Holding
AG
, says senior executives recently approached her after reading about attacks on companies such as theirs, which is developing an antibody test for Covid-19. Roche’s chief financial officer wanted to know how the cybersecurity team would battle elevated threats, and business-unit leaders questioned how they could be affected, Ms. Imber said.
“We’re on high alert,” she added.
Read the full story.
Cyberattack Containment
A screenshot of a tweet posted to Barack Obama’s account during an apparent Twitter hacking scheme.
Twitter intrusion highlights chaos of responding to cyberattacks. The breach Wednesday played out in public, with the accounts of influencers such as Barack Obama and Bill Gates requesting money be sent to cryptocurrency accounts. But the relatively scant details about how the breach occurred underscores the at-times chaotic work of responding to threats.
The process of investigating attacks can take time as security teams pinpoint vulnerabilities and contain damage, with new evidence potentially contradicting old as it is uncovered.
“What companies may disclose as the root cause today may be different than what they say a month or a few months from now,” said Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer of cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc.’s consulting arm, Mandiant.
Internal actors were involved in roughly 30% of the nearly 4,000 data breaches last year that
Verizon Communications
Inc.’s
security team analyzed. Most of the attacks were motivated by potential financial gain, according to the company’s 2020 data breach investigations report, rather than espionage.
Read the full story.
Preserving Data Privacy Just Got Tougher
Court ruling leaves companies scrambling for new ways to move data from Europe to the U.S. More than 5,000 companies that do business in the European Union and the U.S. will need to find a new legal footing to move data between the continents after a court ruled Thursday that a widely used agreement could violate European individuals’ right to privacy.
The European Court of Justice ruled on Thursday that the Privacy Shield agreement is invalid because Europeans’ data could be accessed by American law enforcement authorities if it is moved to the U.S.
Barbara Schmitz, head of data privacy at German lighting manufacturer
Osram Licht
AG
, said she would have to review the company’s cloud-computing contracts with Amazon.com Inc. and
Microsoft
Corp.
“We will discuss with companies what they will do in the future about access from U.S. surveillance,” she said. Ms. Schmitz said she would like to switch to European cloud providers, but they are more expensive than Microsoft and Amazon.
Both cloud companies said they use standard contractual clauses to move data.
Read the full story at our website.
Quotable
“The world is watching you.”
— Andy Ellis, chief security officer for Akamai Technologies Inc., on the pressure of responding to cyberattacks that play out in public
Weekend Reading
Forescout Takes Haircut in New Buyout Agreement with Advent
Cybersecurity Veterans Find Benefits and Challenges with Advisory Roles
U.N. Rules Require Cybersecurity Guarantees for Connected Cars
Austrian Telecoms Operator Played Six-Month Game of Cat-and-Mouse With Hacker
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source https://jobsearchtips.net/cyber-daily-coronavirus-researchers-fight-state-sponsored-attacks-twitters-very-public-hack-europe-rethinks-us-data-moves/
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