Collaborate Disseminate
House lawmakers argue that growing consolidation in the health care sector has created vulnerabilities to cyberattacks.
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A measure to address the sale of Americans’ data doesn’t go far enough to rein in the data broker industry, advocates argue.
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Federal privacy legislation fails to gain momentum in the Senate.
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The latest version of the legislation still leaves loopholes for abuses of data including reproductive health data.
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T-Mobile on Friday announced roughly 6 million additional accounts had data was swiped in a recent hack, bringing the total number of victims of the breach to over approximately 55 million individuals. The revelations come as lawmakers have ramped up scrutiny of the company. An additional 5.3 million subscriber accounts had addresses, names, dates of birth, and phone numbers accessed, T-Mobile said. The company also found that the data of 667,000 more accounts of former T-Mobile customers, including their names, phone numbers, addresses and dates of birth, had been accessed Unlike the first set of customers identified by T-Mobile on Wednesday, none of these additional accounts had their Social Security Numbers or ID information compromised, the company said. The new findings also reveal that phone data, IMEI and IMSIs were also accessed. IMEIs, which are often used for advertising purposes, are a unique fingerprint for a device that cannot be […]
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One day after a House panel grilled social media executives about misinformation on their platforms, a top senator blasted Facebook for its “continued amplification of harmful” posts about COVID-19, especially via Facebook-owned Instagram. Senate Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday, saying the company needed to do more to eradicate misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine than promising action. “Facebook’s enforcement of its own policies is consistently and demonstrably insufficient, a trend we have seen in other areas where Facebook has pledged to address misuse of its products or instances of its products amplifying harmful content,” Warner said in the letter. Warner juxtaposed Facebook’s February update of its policies on medical misinformation with the fact that on the day it announced them, some of the top search results for “COVID vaccine” on Instagram lead to anti-vaccine accounts. In particular, Warner said he was disturbed by a […]
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The overwhelming majority of news links shared on Parler in the days surrounding the Capitol insurrection last month were filled with misinformation, according to an analysis by NewsGuard and PeakMetrics. In all, 87% of news links shared on Parler around the Jan. 6 riots contained misinformation, the analysis published Wednesday concluded. One of the most popular sites shared across the social networking platform was a site that appeared to be an American news outlet, called American Conservatives Today, but which actually was run from North Macedonia and plagiarized stories from The Gateway Pundit. The site, which was created in December of last year, spread lies that the voting equipment maker Dominion Voting Systems was switching votes from then-President Donald Trump to then-candidate Joe Biden. Other popular misinformation-based sites that spread falsehoods on Parler included a video website linked with Alex Jones, InfoWars.com’s founder, which spread lies that Biden was interested […]
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With reports of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and disinformation proliferating on tech platforms, Democratic leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday said they want answers from the industry’s titans about what they’re doing to stop it. “As the country enters this next phase in its fight against the virus — the success of which is dependent on hundreds of millions of Americans trusting the science behind these vaccines — the Committee is deeply troubled by news reports of coronavirus vaccine misinformation on your platform,” wrote Democratic leaders of the panel, including Chairman Frank Pallone, D-N.J., to the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter. It’s the latest application of pressure on tech companies from government officials to halt fake news about COVID-19. Just last week, the European Union said it expects Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter to continue delivering monthly reports on the subject for another six months. There’s […]
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The industry-wide program for documenting hardware and software vulnerabilities suffers from fluctuating funding and insufficient oversight, according to a more than year-long investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “The historical practices for managing the…program are clearly insufficient,” members of the committee wrote in letters Monday to the Department of Homeland Security, which sponsors the program, and the not-for-profit MITRE Corp., which maintains it. “Barring significant improvements, they will likely lead again to challenges that have direct, negative impacts on stakeholders across society.” The program in question, the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database, has for nearly two decades been a common lexicon for researchers and companies that document security flaws. But the program has experienced a significant backlog as some researchers have struggled to get a response to their submissions. MITRE has undertaken reforms of the program, but House lawmakers say the “root causes” of the program’s woes – its lack […]
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House lawmakers are calling on stakeholders in the health care industry for tips on how to secure old technology in the medical field. The Committee on Energy and Commerce put out a request for information Friday detailing its concern that outdated equipment and software used in hospitals and other medical organizations pose cybersecurity vulnerabilities that can put patients at risk. “While health care cybersecurity is a complex, nuanced challenge with many different contributing factors, the use of legacy technologies, which are typically more insecure than their modern counterparts, continues to be a root cause of many incidents,” the committee wrote. Fueling the committee’s concern is the WannaCry ransomware attack that paralyzed operations at numerous hospitals and health organizations around the world. The May 2017 attack, which has been widely attributed to North Korea, exploited unpatched versions of Microsoft Windows. In some cases, the machines were being used to run medical devices, such as MRI scanners and […]
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