Europol is claiming to have helped dismantle an organized crime group that defrauded US banks out of an estimated €12m ($14.4m) One a single day in October last year, an international police team led by the Spanish National Police (Policía Nacional) and the US Secret Service carried out 40 house searches, arrested 37 suspects and seized 13 luxury cars. As a result of Operation Secreto, they also froze 87 bank accounts holding a total of €1.3m (£1.6m). …

Prior the pandemic, you could ask a dozen people what “the future of work” meant and get 13 different answers. Some insisted it was about distributing discrete responsibilities among two-pizza teams, while others preached about robots eliminating jobs and the need for universal basic income as compensation. Then COVID-19 pressed the fast-forward button, and we learned about the immediate, practical future of work in a hurry. The most obvious lesson – you don’t need to…

Patients and employees from 11 hospitals in the US have had their personal information exposed after hackers reportedly published tens of thousands of records online. The files come from Leon Medical Centers, which runs eight facilities in Florida, and Nocona General Hospital, which has three in Texas. The compromised information includes patients’ names, addresses and birthdays, medical diagnoses and letters to insurers. Also exposed was a folder containing background checks on hospital staff, according to…

Data breaches are becoming increasingly common, and one factor driving this escalation is the fact that today’s IT systems are integrated and interconnected, requiring login information from multiple parties and services. In response, Amazon Web Services has newly launched the AWS Secrets Manager, a service designed to help organizations get a handle on these “secrets” by storing and accessing them in a secure way. A modern IT system may require any combination of different types of…

NorthMarq CIO Dan Ritch looks back on the tumult of 2020 with a healthy perspective on his IT team’s accomplishments during COVID-19’s workplace upheaval, and with reverence for what lies ahead. On the bright side, “It gave me more perspective on what we must do to meet our customer demands and it allowed us to accelerate our investments in technology,” Ritch says. But the year ahead poses more questions than answers. “This has set us up for…

The founder of two cryptocurrency hedge funds has pleaded guilty to securities fraud after apparently defrauding investors out of almost $100m. Australian national Stefan He Qin, 24, launched Virgil Sigma and VQR in New York in 2017 and February 2020 respectively. The former purported to earn money from an algorithm which took advantage of market price differences between digital currencies, while the latter employed a number of trading strategies. Together, the funds are said to…

The following post reviews The Backup Bible, a 204 page ebook written by Eric Siron and published by Altaro Software. I’ve decided to break this down into a short discussion around each section, 3 in total, to help with the flow of the text. The Backup Bible can be downloaded for free here. Initial thoughts on downloading the ebook and flicking through; clearly a lot of research and work has gone into this based on…

Data loss is the number one result of a fruitful phishing campaign, but account compromises and ransomware attacks can threaten your organization as well, says Proofpoint. Image: iStock/OrnRin Phishing attacks seem like a relatively simple tactic on the part of cybercriminals. Set up a phishing webpage, create your phishing email, send the email to targeted recipients, and then wait for those stolen account credentials and other compromised information to come your way. On the receiving…