US Crediting reporting company Equifax has been slapped with a fine of $658,000 or £500,000 for failing to protect information of more than 15 million UK citizens during a cyber attack which took place last year.
The Information Commissioner’s Office(ICO) has come up with the said conclusion of levying a penalty on Equifax after it reviewed the entire security measures taken up by the credit monitoring company before the cyber incident took place.
UK’s data watchdog suggests that the data breach occurred as Equifax failed to take effective measures to protect the data of its 146 million customers. However, ICO specified in its media update that the fine was levied based on the customer count of Equifax customer’s based in the UK unlike the whole of the database.
ICO which conducted the probe in parallel to the one conducted by Financial Conduct Authority revealed that the credit reference agency failed miserably while protecting the personal info leak of its customers. And so has to pay the said fine within a 90 day period based on the old privacy rules of the regulator.
Meanwhile, in another news which is related to NSA Eternal Blue, a report released by Cyber Threat Alliance(CSA) specified that the vulnerability of Windows software revealed to the world by Shadow Brokers has led to a surge in Illicit cryptocurrency mining.
Eternal Blue was a software tool flaw of Windows operating system developed by NSA. Some hackers took a snippet of this flaw and exploited it further to create Wannacry Ransomware which infected more than 250,000 computer machines across the world hitting Britain’s NHS computer network the most.
Researchers from the Cyber Threat Alliance- an association of Cybersecurity Firms and experts, state that the leak of National Security Agency has seen a 459 % increase in the past year of illegal crypto mining and that took place in the following way.
As hackers objectives rise, it has also increased the use of cryptocurrency which was non-existent once. Since the use of digital currency like Bitcoins, Monero, and Ethereum increased, hackers started to create digital currency by tapping the processing power of computer users to generate virtual currency without their knowledge.
Hence, researchers of the CSA feel that the rise in malware has paved way for an illicit form of crypto mining and all this was possible due to the leak of NSA Eternal Blue.
