Tag Archive for: cybersecurity

Estonia’s BotGuard OÜ secures €12 million in Series A funding to expand global cybersecurity reach

/in


– Advertisement –


BotGuard OÜ, a cybersecurity software company based in Tallinn, has secured €12 million in Series A funding led by MMC Ventures, with participation from Tera Ventures, Expeditions Fund, and angel investors including Stefan Lindeberg. The company specializes in helping web hosting providers manage and protect their infrastructure from malicious threats. With this funding, BotGuard OÜ plans to further develop its technology, recruit tech development talent, and expand its sales and marketing teams as it continues to scale globally.

BotGuard is a cybersecurity company founded in 2019, with a global presence and clients across more than 30 countries. The company specializes in developing user-friendly online tools designed to protect businesses from contemporary web threats. Embracing a remote-first culture, BotGuard boasts an international team comprising over 15 nationalities, collaborating on agile projects to enhance internet security for businesses and individuals worldwide. The company has secured funding through various rounds, with notable investors including Tera Ventures and Expeditions Fund.

Nik Rozenberg, CEO and co-founder at Botguard OÜ, says, “Every business should have effective web traffic management, yet there are no affordable solutions focused on the SME segment due to complicated and expensive onboarding processes. Malicious bot traffic can be extremely harmful for businesses – particularly for the likes of e-commerce retailers that depend on their website to operate – and organisations require tools that keep pace with the rapidly-evolving threat landscape. Even neutral web traffic – like some crawler bots – can drive up management costs. We are democratising web security by offering web hosting providers a flexible, easy-to-use, and cost-effective solution that still offers the highest level of control over web traffic. We are excited for this next stage of our growth journey as we continue to innovate and expand into new territories.”

Mina Samaan, Partner at MMC Ventures, states, “Born from the pain of living through this problem, Nik and Denis have built an impressive business, and the incredible traction BotGuard…

Source…

What UnitedHealth’s cyberattack teaches about cybersecurity

/in


Do employers really know how safe their data is? UnitedHealth’s payment processing company Change Healthcare found out the hard way after being hacked last month — and the consequences are staggering.

Change Healthcare is responsible for 14 billion clinical, financial and operational transactions each year, according to its website, and processes an estimated 50% of medical claims in the U.S. To put it lightly, Change Healthcare’s cyberattack on Feb. 21 put American provider and patient data at risk, and now the U.S. government is opening an investigation to find out how much data has been breached and if the company has complied with HIPPA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which protects patient information.

“Ransomware attacks like the one on Change Healthcare aim to stop organizations from functioning by using encryption to make critical systems unusable,” says Mark Stockley, cybersecurity expert at Malwarebytes, an anti-malware software company. “Attacks are carried out by criminal hackers who break into vulnerable organizations, explore their networks, steal valuable data and quietly distribute their ransomware to as many computers as they can.”

Read more: Alabama has updated its IVF ruling. What can employers learn from it?

Providers under UnitedHealth are struggling to get reimbursed for their services, and patients are struggling to access medications as the healthcare company tries to restore medical claims and electronic payment access. This means hospitals and pharmacies are left to wait and absorb an unfathomable financial burden. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has asked insurers to waive certain authorizations and accept physical bills from doctors and hospitals — but those can take months to process.  

UnitedHealth stated these services should be up and running later this month, but there’s no fixing the breach itself. The American Hospital Association has deemed this attack the most “significant” event of its kind in the history of the U.S. healthcare system. 

Read more: Ed Ligonde shares the ‘why’ that guides his career in benefits

Stockley stresses that cyberattacks are only becoming more common, with the Office for…

Source…

Schools don’t have great cybersecurity, and hackers have caught on : NPR

/in


School cyberattacks are on the rise.
School cyberattacks are on the rise.

Scott Elder has a pretty typical morning routine. He wakes up at 7 a.m., drinks coffee and feeds the dogs, Bella (a rat terrier) and Spencer (a Chihuahua). But on Jan. 12, 2022, Elder’s routine was interrupted by a concerning phone call.

Elder is the superintendent of Albuquerque Public Schools in New Mexico, and the call came from his district’s IT department, saying they had found some sort of computer virus.

He recalls thinking, “Oh, we’ve got a bug in the system and they found it so they’ll just kill it and we’ll be done, right?”

The bug was in the student records system. So Elder’s IT staff shut that network down. But that meant teachers wouldn’t have access to basic information about the almost 70,000 students enrolled in New Mexico’s largest school district. Educators couldn’t take attendance, wouldn’t know children’s bus routes and were locked out of grading systems.

Meanwhile, IT staff was desperately trying to figure out whether the computer virus had spread to their health records, security system and payroll.

Over the course of the morning, Elder began to understand the enormity of the situation.

Health care company ties Russian-linked cybercriminals to prescriptions breach

“I would say that I went from mildly disturbed at 7 a.m., to very concerned by 9 a.m., to sick to my stomach by noon because I was beginning to realize that this was not a one-day event, that we had a real problem.”

Then came the ransom demand for more than a million dollars.

School systems of every size have been hit by cyberattacks, from urban districts like Los Angeles and Atlanta, to rural districts in Pennsylvania and Illinois. And the problem has been growing.

While it’s hard to know exactly how many K-12 school systems have been targeted by hackers, an analysis by the cyber security firm Emsisoft estimates that 45 school districts were attacked in 2022. In 2023, Emsisoft found that number more than doubled, to 108.

“The education sector has been and continues to be very heavily…

Source…

New Jersey Takes Stock of Cybersecurity Threats, Protections

/in


There’s a cybersecurity concern that often doesn’t get enough attention, according to New Jersey CISO Michael Geraghty. That’s systemic cybersecurity risk, where an attack on one organization has effects that ripple out across the wider sector.

“Most of the time we think of, let’s say, a school system gets hit with ransomware, a system has to shut down, and it’s a localized incident,” said Geraghty, who is also director of the New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Cell (NJCCIC).

But attacks like the recent ransomware incident that disrupted Change Healthcare show just how hard systemic impacts can hit. Through that attack, actors were able to affect hospitals across the country.


“Here we have one organization — Change Healthcare — where it’s an individual organization that’s affecting the rest of the health-care system in the United States,” Geraghty said.

UnitedHealth Group’s Change Healthcare is a major medical claims processor. BlackCat ransomware struck the company, leading to a prolonged outage that left many hospitals and other health-care providers struggling to submit claims to insurance. Many have been running low on funds. The CEO of independent physician practices network Aledade told the Washington Post that about a quarter of U.S. physician practices are in severe financial distress.

Systemic risk is especially high in sectors where many players rely on the same vendor or technology. That’s what’s made Change Healthcare, MOVEit and Citrix Bleed nationwide events.

New Jersey organizations suffered from the latter two, with MOVEit compromising the personal info of more than 1 million residents, based on incidents reported to NJCCIC, per the state’s 2024 Threat Assessment report. And Citrix Bleed disrupted New Jersey hospitals, forcing problems ranging from slow patient care to postponed surgeries.

In contrast, election infrastructure is highly diversified, so a single attack would not have wide-scale impacts on election security, Geraghty said. He added that vendor and technology diversification is just one possible security approach, and that organizations…

Source…