By Cameron Abbott, Warwick Andersen, Rob Pulham and Jacqueline Patishman
On 7 May, the American Colonial Pipeline Company (Colonial Pipeline) network, which operates the largest fuel pipeline in the US, was shut-down by a cyber-attack for several days causing fuel shortages, the highest fuel prices in years and the declaration of a state of emergency in four US states.
Read MoreBy Cameron Abbott and Karla Hodgson
This month Microsoft reported that its Threat Intelligence Center discovered that IoT (internet of things) devices – a VOIP phone, a printer and a video decoder – were used to gain access to corporate networks in April.
Microsoft have identified Strontium – also known as Fancy Bear or APT28 – as the culprit, a hacker group associated with the Russian government who appear to be targeting government, IT, military and defence, engineering, medical and education sectors. Strontium has been linked to the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s presidential election campaign and of the email accounts of researchers investigating the missile strike on MH17 and the Skripal poisonings. In the last 12 months alone Microsoft has delivered almost 1,400 notifications to those targeted or compromised by Strontium.
Read MoreBy Cameron Abbott and Edwin Tan
Just a month after the WannaCry ransomware infected devices around the globe, a new strain calling itself Petya has struck overnight. Petya looks and operates the same way as WannaCry, locking out users from their systems and demanding a ransom of US$300 in order to decrypt files stored on the device. To spread across devices, Petya utilises exactly the same vulnerability used in WannaCry, patched by Microsoft in March 2017.
Organisations in Europe have been the worst hit, with the ransomware slowly spreading to the United States, and to Australia this morning as organisations boot up their computers. The Prime Minister of Ukraine has called the attack on his country “unprecedented”, with the government’s computer network going down, and the state power distributor being disrupted.
A global law firm has also been hit by Petya, with its offices in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and the US all affected by the attack. This continues a worrying trend of law firms being breached as of late, potentially exposing thousands of clients to commercial and legal risk.
We cannot emphasise enough the importance of keeping all devices and systems patched and up-to-date. Unfortunately, it seems that organisations around the globe, even those professing to be experts in cybersecurity, are still unprepared to deal with cyber-attacks and mitigate their risks.
The UK National Cyber Security Center has released guidance to help both home users and organisations limit the impact of ransomware attacks. It can be read here.
By Cameron Abbott, Rob Pulham and Simon Ly
On 11 April 2016, the Privacy Commissioner released a guide to deal with issues associated with data breaches. This is aimed at entities regulated by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) in order to assist them with complying with the Australian Privacy Principles.
When (and it is likely to be a matter of when and not if) your entity is subject to a data breach, whether it be through your system being hacked or if devices are lost or stolen, it is important that you are equipped to deal with it. It is important to get in front of such problems and have pre-prepared action plans given that it is likely that the first 24 hours will be the most crucial in determining your level of success in dealing with a data breach. Data breaches can be expensive, both in a monetary and reputational sense.
In the guide, the Privacy Commissioner highlighted that a written data breach response plan is an important tool to help deal with such issues. Such a plan should include:
Such a plan needs to be regularly reviewed and updated, with all relevant staff kept up to date so that they know what actions they are expected to take.
The Privacy Commissioner suggests the following four steps to be taken when a data breach is discovered:
For more information, please feel free to contact us. You can find out more information on practical steps you can take here.
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