Trying to DDoS the White House Website to Protest Trump’s Inauguration Violates CFAA

There has been a lot of buzz this past week about protesters indicating they plan to protest President-Elect Trump's inauguration by launching a DDoS attack on the White House website. This plan has received some high-profile publicity by articles in magazines such as Forbes and PC World. I initially learned of this discussion when I …

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How to Protect Yourself from Cell Phone Cyber Threats (WFAA TV Interview)

WFAA TV's Jane McGarry interviewed Shawn Tuma on the Good Morning Texas show to discuss how you can protect yourself from cell phone cyber threats and identity theft (Jan. 18, 2017) (WFAA LINK). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAP6QG5FPPU

Feds: Chinese Traders Busted, Trading on Info “Hacked” from Law Firms via Email Compromise

A warning for law firms: Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the case should serve as a "wake-up call for law firms around the world." "You are and will be targets of cyber hacking, because you have information valuable to would-be criminals," Bharara said in a statement. But …

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A Cybersecurity Night Before Christmas

My friend Paul Ferrillo (@PaulFerrillo) shared a cybersecurity version of the Night Before Christmas that I thought was brilliant. Wanting to be sure and properly credit this fine work, I asked Paul about attribution ... since we can never be too confident in attribution, after all, yet it is critically important. Paul then confessed that it …

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New York Cybersecurity Regulations Delayed, Being Revised

Photo Credit: Photo Credit: Marco Verch Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 (no changes were made to the image) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en The New York Department of Financial Services has pushed back the effective date of its Cybersecurity Regulations from January 1, 2017 to March 1, 2017. This is to give the NYDFS time to significantly revise the proposed Cybersecurity …

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Top 10 Web Resources for Privacy Professionals | LinkedIn Pulse

Sharing the following which I found to be a pretty good list - check it out:As 2017 fast approaches and we continue to plan posts for the year ahead, we thought we would take a look back at some of the more popular topics we have addressed. We began creating these posts with As 2017 fast …

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Ashley Madison & FTC Settle Data Breach Case – Does Your Company Have These Cybersecurity Shortcomings?

Ashley Madison and the FTC announced a settlement of the investigation into the breach data breach of 36 million AshleyMadison.com users that was being pursued by the FTC and several states' attorneys general. The cost to Ashley Madison is substantial: a total judgment of $17.5 million (though only $1.6 million is currently due because of …

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Porn, Politics & Cybersecurity: Are We Seeing Shame Hacking with Texas Elector?

Is the Texas elector who refuses to vote for Trump the first example of shame hacking in politics? In previous posts, I have written about shame hacking which is the use of hacked data for embarrassing or extorting people by threatening to expose such compromising data if they do not comply with whatever demands were made of them. …

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Yahoo Discloses New Breach of 1 Billion User Accounts – This is Big!

Yahoo revealed new security issues affecting more than a billion users’ data, a theft that is separate and twice as large as the hack it disclosed earlier this year. Source: Yahoo Discloses New Breach of 1 Billion User Accounts - WSJ

Top 3 CFAA Takeaways from Facebook v. Power Ventures Case in Ninth Circuit

Here are my top 3 key Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) takeaways from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' Order and Amended Opinion issued on December 9, 2016 in Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc. 1.  A violation of the CFAA can occur when someone "has no permission to access a computer or when such permission …

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