Happy Friday! Let’s recap this week’s cybersecurity happenings as we cruise into the weekend!
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission recently experienced what is believed to be the largest data breach in the organization’s history after four state employees improperly accessed personal account information of 61,104 low-income and disabled Texans, and even stole money from them.
The improperly accessed accounts belonged to thousands of Texans who receive Medicaid, food stamps, and other public assistance. Other incidents of this nature have happened recently, too, involving a total of 7 state employees within the organization. All 7 state employees involved have since been fired, 4 of them being linked to the most recent case that occurred in December, and the others being linked to similar cases that happened throughout 2024.
The state of Texas has a strong dedication to preventing and investigating fraud in public assistance programs, with their entire apparatus being built to focus on outside threat actors, but these recent cases show that some of this focus needs to be shifted to threats from within the agency.
(–Source: Texas Standard
Read More: State employees suspected of stealing from low-income Texans’ public assistance accounts | Texas Standard )
Blacon High School in the UK was hit with a ransomware attack on January 17th that caused the school to close for at least two days. During the school closure, students are still expected to complete work from home via Google Classroom, and can still visit the school to collect lunch.
A majority of the school’s IT systems and phones are down and an outside cybersecurity company is investigating the incident. This is the second major ransomware attack on the UK’s public sector in less than a week.
(–Source: The Register on MSN
Read More: Ransomware attack forces Brit high school to shut doors )
As many as 4.2 million hosts including VPNs, home routers, core internet routers, mobile network gateways, and content delivery network in multiple countries have been found to be vulnerable to attacks relating to tunneling packets that are accepted without verifying the sender’s identity.
These vulnerabilities were discovered as a result of new research showing that security gaps in tunneling protocols can be abused to “create one-way proxies and spoof source IPv4/6 addresses” resulting in the possibility of hackers to gain access to “an organization’s private network or be abused to perform DDoS attacks.”
(–Source: The Hacker News
Read More: Unsecured Tunneling Protocols Expose 4.2 Million Hosts, Including VPNs and Routers )
Well-known hacker “IntelBroker” is claiming to have stolen sensitive information from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, the enterprise IT division of HP. After IntelBroker posted on a popular cybercrime forum last week with claiming to have the company’s data, an investigation has been launched.
At this time, there has been no operational impact to the company’s business functions, but the claims are being taken seriously and investigated. IntelBroker is said to have stolen product source code, information from GitHub and GitLab, and access keys.
(–Source: TechCrunch on MSN
Read More: HPE investigating security breach after hacker claims theft of sensitive data )
After the recent PowerSchool data breach that exposed the information of teachers and students, the education software provider is being hit with three federal lawsuits alleging that the company failed to implement adequate security measures and provide a timely notice of the breach.
(–Source: DataBreaches.Net
Read More: PowerSchool Faces Suit Over Breach of Student, Teacher Data – DataBreaches.Net )
Anime fans with Premium accounts on the popular anime streaming site Crunchyroll should consider changing their passwords after many premium account login details were shared on X (formerly Twitter).
While the full extent of the breach is unknown, the post, which contained a large handful of premium subscribers’ login information has since been deleted, but garnered almost 20,000 likes on the platform and the leaked information can still be easily found online.
(–Source: Anime Mojo
Read More: CRUNCHYROLL Reportedly Hacked; Premium Account Login Passwords Leak Online )
