August 1

Alberta gets new a privacy commissioner, Apple traffic briefly runs through Russia and more. Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It's Monday, August 1st, 2022.

Was it a tactic in the Russia-Ukraine cyber war? Finally, a new process is available for more digital secure signing of NPM packages to prevent code from being tampered with. The lawsuit comes after the news site The Markup did a big report on the Meta Pixel found on a number of U.S. hospital websites. The news site HealthcareDive.com notes that in 2017 a class action lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly collecting and using health data for targeted ads without people’s permission was dismissed. Thirty-five organizations including Blue Cross insurance providers in several states, the Humana health insurance company and the Kaiser Permanente healthcare provider have been notified. In the year that ended May 1st, 2021 there were 377 reports of breaches of security controls in Alberta companies involving personal information that could cause a real risk of significant harm to individuals. And they’re blaming Facebook parent Meta. Last month an individual filed a class action lawsuit against Meta and two California medical institutions, alleging their health information had been captured from hospital websites in violation of federal and state laws by Meta’s pixel tracking tool. Another is that it can be hard to determine the exact date an account was compromised. Commentators at the SANS Institute, an IT training provider, say we shouldn’t ascribe malice to something that could be explained by a simple typo. The leading cause of reported data breaches during those 11 years was compromised IT systems by things like installation of malware, exploitation of vulnerabilities and hacking. The year before it took 119. The second leading cause was theft of physical documents, laptops or portable storage devices.