Happy Monday, and happy (almost) New Year! In today’s news, new cybersecurity laws, called “Insurance Data Security Laws,” were just passed about a week ago, and will take effect in CT on October 1, 2020, and in NH on January 1, 2021. The laws will “affect insurance carriers, producers, and other businesses licensed by the Connecticut Insurance Department and the New Hampshire Insurance Department.” The laws will require businesses to create and implement cybersecurity risk management programs.
As for an interesting fact, the number of ransomware attacks in 2019 was way higher than anyone thought, as they were declining majorly in 2018. “Emsisoft recently estimated that ransomware attacks have cost US government agencies, educational establishments, and healthcare providers alone more than $7.5 billion this year.” With this being said, it has also been estimated that ransomware attacks in 2020 are going to be just as bad as they were in 2019, if not worse.
Lastly, the New York Times Privacy Project received a large data set from an unnamed data location company. The data included 50 billion location pings generated by the smartphones of 12 million Americans between 2016 and 2017. The data had such detail on smartphone users, one of the points on the activity map showed a “senior Defense Department official and his wife as they attended the Women’s March in 2017.” The unnamed company even traced smartphone pings from workers inside the Pentagon. The data is supposedly not as anonymous as we think, and it is collected using GPS, Bluetooth beacons, and WiFi.
That’s all for today! Thank you for tuning in to this week’s segment of “Mondays With Miranda!” Keep up to date with current news by following NeQter Labs on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We love comments and questions, so drop me an email [email protected]. Happy New Year!