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A major and unexpected outage in Amazon’s cloud computing network resulted in significant disruption to many businesses and services on Tuesday, Dec 7th. This outage impacted a large variety of businesses ranging from airline reservations, auto dealerships, payment applications, and streaming services.
With the increase in Ransomware attacks over the last year, it seems that’s all we read these days in the headlines. It was estimated that in 2020 the world saw a 150% increase in ransomware attacks and the trend has continued into and throughout 2021. Many businesses around the world are searching for advice on how to increase their security and reduce the threat of becoming the next victim of an attack.
On Tuesday the OPP has announced that a government employee is one of the two people charged following an investigation into a security breach related to Ontario's COVID-19 immunization system.
The Toronto Transit Commission was recently a target of a very large cyber breach which led to service shut down as well as compromised employee data. The ransomware attack was discovered by their IT team through unusual network activity, at that time the effect of the attack seemed very minimal but quickly took a turn by midday the next day.
The University of Colorado has recently had to reach out to thousands of students to advise them of an unfortunate data breach that has compromised personal information. According to sources, the breach occurred through unpatched software associated with Atlassian Corporation Plc
Back in August of last year, India was the victim of a major data breach which resulted in the exposure of data for 35 million consumers, since then the Reserve Bank of India has updated its guidelines to mandate tokenization through Indian Merchants.
Every year the best hackers from all over China join a popular hacking event to showcase their best hacking capabilities. The event that goes by the name of Tianfu Cup, offers the opportunity for hackers to break into the latest devices and systems while using unique, never-seen methods.
Fimmick is a well-established Hong Kong marketing firm with office locations across China, they represent big clients such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and Shel. This firm has been the latest target by the known Russian ransomware organization which goes by the name of REvil.
A company’s worst nightmare consists of potential malicious threats and breaches to its customer database. Zero-day hacking attacks are done by outside parties by discovering and exploiting vulnerable software malfunction of which a vendor and his development team may not be aware.
PCI DSS has announced that it will be improving its security standards concerning payments done through mobile devices. Currently, there are two separate standards mandates, the first being software-based and working around PINprotection (SPoC)
Within the last two years, we have seen many storefronts migrate to a full eCommerce business, as well as other business types are required to provide online payment methods for their customer’s convenience and accommodation due to covid-19 restrictions. These companies that are now collecting customers’ personal information, along with payment information either over the phone or online are exposed to new potential breaches and threats due to the additional collection method.
By now everyone is adapting to the new 3DS 2.0 and MIT framework mandate which was introduced back in 2019. However, for some merchants, the 3DS 2.0 transaction flow continues to present challenges to their business processes. The most common concern we have received regarding the 3DS process is related to the BIN, while the roadblock may be different from Merchant to Merchant the underlying issue is the same and relates to the 3DS’ need to collect the BIN on the front end before Merchants have had a chance to analyze it.