Posts about Cybersecurity by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
by Daniel J. Solove I’ve really been enjoying the new TV series Mr. Robot on USA. Network. It presents highly-engaging depictions of hacking and social engineering, and it is great entertainment for privacy and security geeks. The protagonist is Elliot Alderson (played by Rami Malek), a tech who works at a cybersecurity firm in New York City. […]
By Daniel J. Solove A recent New York Times article discusses the issue of what happens to your personal data when companies go bankrupt or are sold to other companies: When sites and apps get acquired or go bankrupt, the consumer data they have amassed may be among the companies’ most valuable assets. And […]
By Daniel J. Solove I’m a St. Louis Cardinals fan, so I guess it is fitting that my favorite team becomes embroiled in a big privacy and data security incident. At the outset, apologies for the feature photo above. It pulled up under a search for “baseball hacker,” and as a collector of ridiculous […]
by Daniel J. Solove There are certainly many hackers with sophisticated technical skills and potent malicious technologies. These threats can seem akin to Leviathan — all powerful and insurmountable. It can be easy to get caught up focusing on the Leviathan and miss the low-hanging fruit of cybersecurity. This low-hanging fruit consists of rather simple […]
By Daniel J. Solove The recent breach of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) network involved personal data on millions of federal employees, including data related to background checks. OPM is now offering 18 months of free credit monitoring and identity theft insurance to victims. But as experts note in a recent Washington Post article, […]
by Daniel J. Solove A few days ago, I posted about how boards of directors must grapple with privacy and cybersecurity. Today, I came across a survey by NYSE Governance Services and Vericode of 200 directors in various industries. According to the survey, about two-thirds of directors are less than confident about their company’s cybersecurity. […]
By Daniel J. Solove Privacy and cybersecurity have become issues that should be addressed at the board level. No longer minor risks, privacy and cybersecurity have become existential issues. The costs and reputational harm of privacy and security incidents can be devastating. Yet not enough boards are adequately engaged with these issues. According to a […]
by Daniel J. Solove Recently, hackers from China stole 4.5 million records of patients from a hospital chain in Tennessee. Do you think that’s big? As a Bloomberg article notes, however,” they haven’t come close to entering the ranks of the biggest breaches of all time. In fact, they haven’t even cracked the top […]
by Daniel J. Solove It sounds like a late April Fool’s joke, but it isn’t. Heartbleed, a data security bug in Open SSL, allows hackers to access personal data and encryption keys. This vulnerability has existed for 2+ years, and there is no way to know if your data has been compromised. And the majority […]
Today’s Washington Post contains an interesting article about identity theft. Some identity thieves enlist unwitting employees of financial institutions into supplying them with personal information: