Tag Archive for: point

Crown Point schools still investigating possible cyber hack – Chicago Tribune

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Crown Point Community School Corp. officials say it’s still unclear if personal information was accessed in a possible network breach that forced the cancellation of classes on Nov. 28.

Superintendent Todd Terrill advised staff and student families to monitor financial statements and credit card reports for suspicious and unauthorized activity.

“As previously noted, these investigations can take weeks,” Terrill said in a message to staff and families.

“I know many of you have concerns and have waited patiently for more news. Our team shares those concerns. Although we have not yet determined if any sensitive or personal information is at risk as a result of this event, we are providing you with information about proactive measures you can take to protect your or your child’s information should you feel it is appropriate to do so.”

Terrill said those concerned could place a fraud alert on credit files at no cost for one-year or place a security freeze on credit files which prohibits a consumer reporting agency from releasing information in a credit card report without express authorization.

He said once the investigation is complete, the district will directly notify anyone whose information is affected.

Assistant Crown Point Police Chief Jim Janda said the network outage incident hasn’t been reported to police.

After missing one day, students returned to class Nov. 29 and most everyday activities have resumed.

Last month, officials suspected the network was compromised and brought in a cybersecurity firm to investigate and work with the district’s technology team to restore service.

A year ago, the Duneland School Corp. in Chesterton experienced a computer system hack that exposed personal employee data including Social Security numbers, birth dates and insurance plan information.

The Duneland cyber breach is being investigated by the FBI, a school official said.

The district has updated its system to include two-factor authentication for access to its private network and a phishing email program was added for all users.

Geofencing was added on firewall policies, preventing traffic from outside the U.S. It switched to encrypted backups and added other tools to protect the…

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Crypto Prime Broker Floating Point Group Appoints Chris Hazelton as Director of Marketing

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As the first marketing hire, the addition sets a foundation with strong crypto and cybersecurity marketing experience

HOBOKEN, N.J., Sept. 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Floating Point Group (FPG), a cryptocurrency prime brokerage with an institutional trading desk and settlement platform announced that Chris Hazelton has joined as Director of Marketing.

Hazelton has more than fifteen years of experience in marketing and market research, the last seven of which he spent leading product marketing for crypto and cybersecurity services. He built and led marketing teams for custody technology provider Fireblocks, mobile security pioneer Lookout, as well as BlackBerry’s $400m enterprise software division. His experience also includes 10 years as an industry analyst with S&P Market Intelligence and IDC Research.

As Director of Marketing Hazelton will drive FPG’s brand-building and market leadership across demand generation, content, PR, social, and product marketing. As well as championing customers scaling their crypto businesses with FlowVault.

“Blockchain and cryptocurrency companies are remarkably unsuccessful as a cohort in communicating what they do,” said Kevin March, Co-Founder of Floating Point Group. “Chris’s experience as a marketing leader at several exceptional businesses will help us refine our message to an institutional audience that’s overwhelmed with new information and show tangible examples of how we’ve helped customers like them scale successfully in crypto.”

FPG aims to be a pillar of unrivaled access to cryptocurrency for institutions interested in the value digital assets hold. Hazelton will use his crypto marketing experience, which includes launching the first permissioned DeFi pool and first Web3 development platform, to work directly with FPG’s co-founders to build a roadmap to empower the next wave of institutional adoption.

About Floating Point Group

Floating Point Group is a crypto prime brokerage platform and agency trading desk for asset managers that removes the barriers and complications to access liquidity across a broad set of markets in order to deploy advanced cryptocurrency-centric strategies at scale. The company carries insurance for custodied…

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Troop cuts will leave the Army at breaking point, says Lord Dannatt

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“I’m afraid the future is not going to be returned to things pre 24th of February, the future is going to be a grumpy, resurgent Russia on the borders of countries in Eastern Europe,” he said. “We’ve got to play our part in deterring Russian aggression.”

Lord Dannatt added: “When it comes to old fashioned fighting, numbers do matter and to have an Army of only just over 70,000 30 per cent down from where we were 10 years ago is going to leave us woefully short if we find that we’ve got to maintain large number of troops at high readiness forward-deployed in Eastern Europe.” 

Last week, Mr Johnson said the UK would boost its defence spending in the wake of the war in Ukraine, as he warned of a “very different era” of insecurity in Europe. However, his official spokesman also insisted that UK troop numbers were “the right size”.

The spokesman added that it was “wrong to focus solely on the numbers” and stressed that the Government was investing in cyber warfare and other new technology. 

However, General Sir Patrick Sanders, the new head of the Army, warned last week that “it would be perverse” for himself to advocate for reducing the size of the Army “as a land war rages in Europe and [Vladimir] Putin’s territorial ambitions extend into the rest of the decade and beyond Ukraine”.

Lord Dannatt also said he anticpated that Russia would take Donetsk and Luhansk in the “next few days and weeks”.

However, he cautioned that in doing so Russia would not have won the war, nor would Ukrainians have lost. He said that instead, the war would go “into the deep trees”.

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Network Attacks at Highest Point Over Last Three Years, says New Report

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WatchGuard Technologies last week announced findings from its most recent quarterly Internet Security Report, detailing the top malware trends and network security threats analyzed by WatchGuard Threat Lab researchers. 

Of note, researchers found a record number of evasive malware detections. Advanced threats increased by 33% indicating a higher level of zero day threats than ever before. Network detections also continued an upward trajectory, with the Americas receiving the majority of attacks.

Other key findings from this Internet Security Report, which analyzes data from Q4 2021, include:

  •  – Total network attack detections continue to climb, highlighting the complexity of network security – The trajectory of network intrusion detections continued its upward climb with the largest total detections of any quarter in the last three years. This also represented a 39% increase quarter over quarter. This may be due to the continued targeting of old vulnerabilities as well as the growth in organizations’ networks; as new devices come online and old vulnerabilities remain unpatched, network security is becoming more complex.
  • Malware threats were detected in EMEA at a much higher rate than other regions in the world – Europe, the Middle East and Africa were also the regions most targeted by malware threats in Q4. In fact, EMEA saw malware detections per Firebox (49%) at near or above double the rate as other regions of the world (AMER 23% and APAC 29%). 


  •  – 78% of malware delivered via encrypted connections is evasive – Overall, 67% of malware detections arrived over an encrypted connection, and within those malware detections, 78% were evasive zero-day malware threats that evade basic detections. This continues a trend seen in previous quarters. These threats can often be stopped at the perimeter by setting firewalls to decrypt and scan incoming traffic – a step that, unfortunately, many organizations fail to take.
  •  – A new leader in Office exploit malware emerges – Q4 saw a significant incidence of malware targeting Office documents, similar to findings from Q3. CVE-2018-0802 remains on the top 10 malware list, landing at number 5 this…

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