More and more data breaches are leading to blackmail but the stats don’t tell the whole story. We’ll explain.

Plus the latest in the Sony hack, and the wider reaction. Plus a great batch of emails & much, much more!

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— Show Notes: —

Illinois Hospital being blackmailed with stolen Patient Data

• “An Illinois hospital says someone attempted to blackmail it to stop the release of data about some of its patients.”
• The hospital chain received an anonymous email asking for a substantial amount of money in order to prevent the release of patient data. A sample of the data was included in the email as proof
• “The hospital says it immediately notified law enforcement agencies.”
• “An investigation discovered the data relates to patients who visited Clay County Hospital clinics on or before February 2012. A hospital representative declined to disclose how many people are involved but said the data is limited to their names, addresses, Social Security numbers and dates of birth. No medical information was compromised in the breach”
• “The hospital believes the data has not been released so far. It didn’t disclose how the data was obtained but said an audit by an outside expert concluded the hospital hadn’t been hacked.”
• The age of the data suggests that the compromise may have involved backups and/or cold storage
• It is not clear of the Hospital stores the older data themselves, or if they rely on a 3rd party provider that may have been compromised
• “A recent report by the Identity Theft Report Center found that by early December there had been 304 breaches so far this year in the U.S. healthcare sector. That’s 42 percent of the 720 breaches reported across the country. But, in part because of the massive breaches at major retailers, the entire healthcare sector only accounted for 9.7 percent of all records compromised in reported breaches so far in 2014.”

Sony cancels the release of “The Interview” – plays the victim

• Sony has apparently cancelled the release of the film that is apparently the cause of the hack of their systems
• A number of cinemas had declined to screen the file after vague threats of physical violence were made
• “We are deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie, and in the process do damage to our company, our employees, and the American public,” Sony’s statement continues. “We stand by our filmmakers and their right to free expression and are extremely disappointed by this outcome.”
• If they stand for freedom of expression, they wouldn’t have cancelled the movie
• A number of people believe that the hackers may have found something especially damaging to Sony, and Sony is hoping to avoid the disclosure
• Bruce Schneier – “It’s really a phenomenally awesome hack—they completely owned this company,”
• “this is like Snowden, only with Sony.” He said that releases from the hack could go on for months.
• That seems to suggest that the hackers will soon leak something that will look very, very bad for the company, Schneier says.
• Earlier this week, Sony sent a letter to news outlets reporting on the leaks, saying that they could face prosecution for downloading stolen information. That letter, Schneier said, was a signal that the worst is still to come.
• Gawker posts a copy of the threatening letter
• “The fact that they sent that letter tells me there is stuff still to be found that Sony is terrified of. There’s some really bad stuff in there—stuff they did, stuff they said, stuff that’s illegal. Someone [from Sony] is going to jail for this.”
• Reaction to the Sony hack is beyond the realm of stupid – This is not terrorism
• Cisco analysis of Wiper malware used at Sony
• Newer version of Wiper malware signed with stolen Sony certificate
• ThreatPost Digital Undergound Podcast – Details of the Sony Breach
• The leak has also covered a number of different plans and plots by the MPAA
• Inclusing the MPAA’s post-SOPA plan to make ISP DNS Servers block sites

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Round Up:

• Viber calls out ESET for flagging them, ESET responds with a digital uppercut
• Yahoo releases new disclosure policy, all new bugs it finds will be disclosed within 90 days
• Report: Mysterious Russian Malware Is Infecting 100,000+ WordPress Sites
• Red October APT team is back, with the CloudAtlas APT attack
• Verizon’s new “end-to-end” encrypted calling app, includes “Government Access Option” – Cellcrypt’s vice president for North America, disputes the idea that building technology to allow wiretapping is a security risk. “It’s only creating a weakness for government agencies,” he says. “Just because a government access option exists, it doesn’t mean other companies can access it.”
• Leaked Government documents reveal Canadian Telco’s offering the Government “Surveillance Ready Networks”, to avoid legislation, and to force small operators out of the market
• Ars was briefly hacked yesterday; here’s what we know (Ars uses PHPass to hash passwords, that is 2048 rounds of MD5. Not as bad as it sounds: If you want to put this into “OL Hashcat” terms, a single R9 290X (video card) can pull ~ 12.2 GH/s on raw MD5, but only 3 MH/s against PHPass. Divide that by 1,071,734 unique salts, and that means our effective speed is only 2.86 H/s. That’s beyond properly slow.)
• A small bank in Kansas may be the future of banking, replacing ‘batched processed’ ACH transfers with instant transfers backed by the existing ATM processing network
• phpBB Status Update
• Study by Dell SecureWorks researchers finds that prices on the Internet Underground are rising