Lifeboat Foundation

In February, ransomware attackers targeted Chain Healthcare, the payment management arm of healthcare giant UnitedHealth Group, causing backlogs in prescription insurance claims.

Ransomware can be introduced to a company’s databases through even the smallest slip by an employee, like clicking a link in a phishing email. But as companies have gotten better at keeping criminals out, the crooks have gotten more creative, Mandiant CTO Charles Carmakal says.

Imagine having telepathic conversations with loved ones, instantaneously accessing superhuman computational power, playing back memories and dreams, or immersing yourself and every sense you possess into a virtual entertainment experience. In the distant future, if brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are successful at reading and writing information to the brain, and if humans adapt to the technology, we could experience some pretty amazing scenarios. But, there are many outstanding questions for how we could ensure a bright future: Who will own the data generated by our brains? Will brain data be bought and sold by data brokers like other personal information today? Will people be forced to use certain BCIs that surveil their brain activity (for example, to make sure you’re paying attention at work and school)? Will BCIs put peoples’ brains at risk of being hacked? As with all new technology, more of these philosophical questions will need to be investigated and answered before there is widespread adoption and use of BCIs in the future.

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Who owns that data?

JPMorgan Chase says it has discovered a data breach affecting the personal information of nearly half a million customers.

New filings with the Office of the Maine Attorney General show the banking giant recently found a software issue that’s been active since August 26th, 2021.

The bug allowed unauthorized access to retirement plan records of 451,809 customers, which contain names, addresses, Social Security numbers and bank account numbers.

The UniSuper CEO, Peter Chun, wrote to the fund’s 620,000 members on Wednesday night, explaining the outage was not the result of a cyber-attack, and no personal data had been exposed as a result of the outage. Chun pinpointed Google’s cloud service as the issue.

In an extraordinary joint statement from Chun and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, the pair apologised to members for the outage, and said it had been “extremely frustrating and disappointing”

They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper’s cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.

Computer hardware giant Dell is sending emails alerting customers to a data breach that, according to a Dark Web hacker forum sales post, impacts 49 million users.

A new malware called “Cuckoo” is on the loose, targeting both Intel and ARM-based Macs.

Nation-state hackers have a new trick — turning Microsoft’s own cloud services into secret command centers to launch attacks undetected.

Don’t let this dangerous malware onto your phone.

Some online scams are more conspicuous than others, but the most insidious can be especially tricky to spot. For instance, last week, cybersecurity firm ThreatFabric uncovered a new Android malware family that cleverly disguises itself as a Google Chrome update. Before you click a link claiming to provide updates for Chrome, be sure that it isn’t fake.

ThreatFabric analysts found the malware — which they dubbed Brokewell — on a fake browser update page designed to fool people into downloading a malicious app. If the page manages to fool you, you’ll end up downloading seriously dangerous malware.