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Pitney Bowes Ransomware Attack, Samsung Galaxy S10 Fingerprint Bypass, Top Technology Fears
You’re listening to the Shared Security Podcast, exploring the trust you put in people, apps, and technology…with your host, Tom Eston.
In episode 91 for October 21st 2019: Pitney Bowes becomes the latest ransomware victim, what are the top technology fears, and the latest on the vulnerability that allows a Samsung Galaxy S10 to be unlocked with anyone’s fingerprint.
Smart phones and other mobile devices have truly become integrated with our daily lives. So much in fact, these devices are causing a new type of stress injury called “text neck”. Text neck is a stress injury which causes pain in your neck caused by excessive use or texting on a mobile device over a long period of time. This condition is increasingly concerning given that all of us seem to be looking down at our devices every minute of every day. Just take a look around you whenever you’re out in public. Our mobile devices have truly become a “pain in our neck”. So if you want an easy way to prevent this condition, try taking more breaks away from your device and simply just put your device down so you are less tempted to use it. And if you want an easy way to get off the grid for a while, put it in a Silent Pocket faraday bag. The nice thing about this solution is that you don’t even have to power off your device! Check out Silent Pocket’s full line of faraday bags and wallets at silentpocket.com and recieve 15% off your order during checkout using discount code “sharedsecurity”.
Welcome to the Shared Security Weekly Blaze Podcast where we update you on this week’s most important cybersecurity and privacy news. These podcasts are published every Monday and are 15 minutes or less quickly giving you “news that you can use”.
Last week shipping and postage provider Pitney Bowes, which serves 90% of businesses in the Fortune 500, was the victim of a ransomware attack preventing customers from adding postage to packages and may have even impacted some mail delivery at the US Postal Service. In a statement the company said quote “Pitney Bowes was affected by a malware attack that encrypted information on some systems and disrupted customer access to some of our services. At this time, the company has seen no evidence that customer or employee data has been improperly accessed.” end quote
Pitney Bowes is most known for its postage meters which can automate the painful process of putting postage on envelopes and packages. Some customers took to Twitter during the outage showing postage meters and associated software with errors and confusing messages about “system faults”. Apparently the meters would still work up until you had to refill funds in order to print out more postage. Check out our show notes for a link to the latest updates from Pitney Bowes on the status of their systems. In related news, late last week business credit rating agency Moody’s issued a “credit negative” event note regarding the ransomware attack meaning the credit agency is cautiously watching the incident but has yet to issue a ratings downgrade. Rating’s agencies like Moody’s are commonly referenced by investors and negative ratings can make it more difficult for a company to raise money and can drive the stock value down. This news is pretty significant in that ratings agencies are now monitoring companies for data breaches and other cybersecurity incidents and issuing ratings adjustments based on the impact of the incident. Just last May, Moody’s downgraded Equifax’s outlook to negative because of the massive data breach that we all know and love. And ironically, Equifax’s outlook remains negative
Published on 6 years, 2 months ago