Cybercriminals breach Aflac as part of hacking spree against US insurance industry


Cybercriminals have breached insurance giant Aflac, potentially stealing Social Security numbers, insurance claims and health information, the company said Friday, the latest in a spree of hacks against the insurance industry.

With billions of dollars in annual revenue and tens of millions of customers, Aflac is the biggest victim yet in the ongoing digital assault on US insurance companies that has the industry on edge and the FBI and private cyber experts scrambling to contain the fallout. Erie Insurance and Philadelphia Insurance Companies have also reported hacks this month, which in those cases have caused widespread disruptions to IT systems used to serve customers. All three insurance-company hacks are consistent with the techniques of a young and rampant cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider, people familiar the investigation tell CNN.

Read more…
Source: CNN News


Sign up for our Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.


Related:

  • Cybercriminal sells tool to hide malware in AMD, NVIDIA GPUs

    August 31, 2021

    Cybercriminals are making strides towards attacks with malware that can execute code from the graphics processing unit (GPU) of a compromised system. While the method is not new and demo code has been published before, projects so far came from the academic world or were incomplete and unrefined. Earlier this month, the proof-of-concept (PoC) was sold on ...

  • Bangkok Airways apologizes for passport info breach as LockBit ransomware group threatens data leak

    August 30, 2021

    Bangkok Airways has apologized for a data breach involving passport information and other personal data in a statement to customers. The company said that it discovered a “cybersecurity attack which resulted in unauthorized and unlawful access to its information system” on August 23. The statement said the company is “deeply sorry for the worry and inconvenience that ...

  • Fujitsu says stolen data being sold on dark web ‘related to customers’

    August 30, 2021

    Data from Japanese tech giant Fujitsu is being sold on the dark web by a group called Marketo, but the company said the information “appears related to customers” and not their own systems. On August 26, Marketo wrote on its leak site that it had 4 GB of stolen data and was selling it. They provided ...

  • Cloudflare says it stopped the largest DDoS attack ever reported

    August 27, 2021

    Cloudflare said it’s system managed to stop the largest reported DDoS attack in July, explaining in a blog post that the attack was 17.2 million requests-per-second, three times larger than any previous one they recorded. Cloudflare’s Omer Yoachimik explained in a blog post that the company serves over 25 million HTTP requests per second on average ...

  • Ransomware: It’s only a matter of time before a smart city falls victim, and we need to take action now

    August 27, 2021

    Ransomware attacks are going to get worse – and one could eventually take out the infrastructure of an entire 5G-enabled smart city, a cybersecurity expert has warned. Cyber criminals deploying ransomware regularly target government services. Not only do public sector IT budgets mean networks are less secure against attacks, but said networks are also used to ...

  • Ragnarok ransomware releases master decryptor after shutdown

    August 26, 2021

    Ragnarok ransomware gang appears to have called it quits and released the master key that can decrypt files locked with their malware. The threat actor did not leave a note explaining the move; all of a sudden, they replaced all the victims on their leak site with a short instruction on how to decrypt files The leak ...