The Under Armour breach provides lessons in the do’s and don’ts of enterprise cyber security and compliance with the EU GDPR

Last week, athletic apparel manufacturer Under Armour announced that its popular MyFitnessPal weight loss and fitness tracking app had been hacked, compromising 150 million accounts. The Under Armour breach is the largest data breach so far this year and ranks among the top five to date. It also makes a good case study in the do’s and don’ts of enterprise cyber security. Let’s examine the lessons enterprises can take away from the Under Armour breach and its fallout, especially as the deadline for the EU GDPR approaches on May 25.

If a breach does happen, prompt disclosure is crucial.

The Under Armour breach was discovered on March 25 and disclosed only four days later; compare this to Equifax, which waited several weeks to notify users it had been hacked (and then chose to do so while the nation’s attention was focused on Hurricane Irma), and Uber, which waited more than a year (after attempting to cover the breach up). Prompt disclosure is going to be even more important under the GDPR, which will require organizations to report breaches within 72 hours.

Segment your data, and collect only the data you need.

The Under Armour breach involved only user names, email addresses, and encrypted passwords. The MyFitnessPal app does not collect Social Security numbers or other government identifiers, and payment information is stored separately, in a part of the system the hackers did not breach.

The GDPR requires organizations to bake data security into their products, policies, procedures, and systems from day one. While network segmentation alone does not constitute data security, it goes a long way towards demonstrating due diligence.

The GDPR will also require organizations to provide users with a plain-language explanation of what user data they are collecting and what they intend on doing with it. If you don’t absolutely need a particular piece of personal information to conduct your business, don’t collect it.

Properly encrypt and salt user passwords.

This is where Under Armour dropped the ball. The company states that while “the majority” of the compromised passwords were hashed using the robust bcrypt hashing function, at least some of the passwords were hashed using the notoriously hackable SHA-1 function. Under Armour has not disclosed why only some of the passwords were encrypted with bcrypt. It also has not specified whether the bcrypt-hashed passwords were salted for extra protection, which involves appending random data that is unique to each user and saving it along with their password.

To properly protect user passwords and fulfill the security requirements of the GDPR, make sure you are using a robust hashing function and salting user passwords. As strong as bcrypt is, it is not unbreakable; the Ashley Madison hack involved 36 million passwords hashed using bcrypt.

Do not reuse passwords.

Although the Under Armour breach yielded “only” email addresses and login credentials, not payment data or sensitive personal data like Social Security Numbers, a lot of people use the same set of login credentials on multiple sites. Armed with these credentials, hackers could attempt to use them on banking, shopping, or social media sites and to access victims’ email accounts. This underscores the importance of using a different, strong password for every system, website, and app.

If you have a MyFitnessPal account, you should log in and change your password right now. If you reused your MyFitnessPal password on any other sites, make sure to change those, too.

The cyber security experts at Lazarus Alliance have deep knowledge of the cyber security field, are continually monitoring the latest information security threats, and are committed to protecting organizations of all sizes from security breaches. Our full-service risk assessment services and Continuum GRC RegTech software will help protect your organization from data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cyber threats.

Lazarus Alliance is proactive cyber security®. Call 1-888-896-7580 to discuss your organization’s cyber security needs and find out how we can help your organization adhere to cyber security regulations, maintain compliance, and secure your systems.

Mueller indictments of Russian cyber criminals put election hacking at top of mind

State officials expressed grave concerns about election hacking the day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller handed down indictments of 13 Russian nationals on charges of interfering with the 2016 presidential election. The Washington Post reports:

At a conference of state secretaries of state in Washington, several officials said the government was slow to share information about specific threats faced by states during the 2016 election. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Russian government hackers tried to gain access to voter registration files or public election sites in 21 states.

Although the hackers are not believed to have manipulated or removed data from state systems, experts worry that the attackers might be more successful this year. And state officials say reticence on the part of Homeland Security to share sensitive information about the incidents could hamper efforts to prepare for the midterms.

Granted, the Mueller indictments allege disinformation and propaganda-spreading using social media, not direct election hacking. However, taken together with the attacks on state elections systems, it is now indisputable that Russian cyber criminals used a highly sophisticated, multi-pronged approach to tamper with the 2016 election. While there have been no reported attacks on state systems since, there is no reason to believe that election hacking attempts by Russians or other foreign threat actors will simply cease; if anything, cyber criminals are likely to step up their game during the critical 2018 midterms this November.

These aren’t new issues; cyber security was a top issue leading up to the 2016 election. Everyone agreed then, and everyone continues to agree now, that more needs to be done to prevent election hacking. So, what’s the holdup?

One of the biggest issues in tackling election hacking is the sheer logistics of U.S. elections. The United States doesn’t have one large national “election system”; it has a patchwork of thousands of mini election systems overseen by individual states and local authorities. Some states have hundreds, even thousands of local election agencies; The Washington Post reports that Wisconsin alone has 1,800. To its credit, Wisconsin has encrypted its database and would like to implement multi-factor authentication. However, this would require election employees to have a second device, such as a cell phone, to log in – and not all of them have work-issued phones or even high-speed internet access.

Not surprisingly, funding is also a stumbling block. Even prior to the 2016 elections, cyber security experts were imploring states to ensure that all of their polling places were using either paper ballots with optical scanners or electronic machines capable of producing paper audit trails. However, as we head toward the midterms, five states are still using electronic machines that do not produce audit trails, and another nine have at least some precincts that still lack paper ballots or audit trails. The problem isn’t that these states don’t want to replace their antiquated systems or hire cyber security experts to help them; they simply don’t have the budget to do so.

Congress Must Act to Prevent Election Hacking

Several bills that would appropriate more money for states to secure their systems against election hacking are pending before Congress, including the Secure Elections Act. Congress can also release funding that was authorized by the 2002 Help America Vote Act, but never appropriated.

The integrity of our elections is the cornerstone of our nation’s democracy. Proactive cyber security measures can prevent election hacking, but states cannot be expected to go it alone; cyber attacks do not respect borders.

The cyber security experts at Lazarus Alliance have deep knowledge of the cyber security field, are continually monitoring the latest information security threats, and are committed to protecting organizations of all sizes from security breaches. Our full-service risk assessment services and Continuum GRC RegTech software will help protect your organization from data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cyber threats.

Lazarus Alliance is proactive cyber security®. Call 1-888-896-7580 to discuss your organization’s cyber security needs and find out how we can help your organization adhere to cyber security regulations, maintain compliance, and secure your systems.

New data breach notification regulations aren’t a matter of if, but when

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission plans to update its six-year-old guidelines regarding data breach notification and cyber risk disclosure, Bank Info Security reports:

The agency has indicated that it expects to refine guidance around how businesses disclose cybersecurity risks to investors as well as require insider trading programs to include blackout rules in the event that a suspected data breach gets discovered.

“Unfortunately, in the reality that we live in now, cyber breaches are going to be increasingly common, and this is in part why the SEC, NFA is so fully focused on cybersecurity,” says Matt Rossi, a former assistant chief litigation counsel to the SEC, NFA who’s now an attorney specializing in securities litigation and enforcement as well as data privacy at global law firm Mayer Brown. “Chairman [Jay] Clayton said it’s one of the greatest risks to the financial system right now.”

There is great irony in the SEC’s announcement. Less than two weeks after the Equifax breach came to light last fall, the agency disclosed that its EDGAR database, which is used to disseminate company news and data to investors, had been hacked – over a year prior.

Be that as it may, data privacy is at top of mind for consumers. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is about to become law in the European Union, and 2017 saw numerous high-profile incidents where breached organizations sat on their hands for extended periods of time before notifying potential victims.

Equifax Breach Incites Outrage from Congress, But No Action

The SEC’s guidelines are just that – guidelines, not legislation – and they apply only to publicly traded firms. While 48 states have data privacy laws on the books, and companies in certain industries are subject to industry-specific regulations or standards, such as HIPAA and PCI DSS, there is no federal data privacy or data breach notification law that applies across industries.

For the past several years, the U.S. government has been under increasing pressure to establish federal data breach notification regulations and address other data privacy issues. This pressure intensified after the Equifax breach was disclosed, and many privacy advocates hoped the incident would finally push Congress to act. Unfortunately, lawmakers’ initial public outrage over the Equifax breach quickly died down, and Congress’ focus shifted back to healthcare and tax reform.

Frustrated with the lack of progress in Washington, states have begun taking matters into their own hands. Last year, New York State passed a sweeping cyber security law that was heavily steeped in data governance and integrated risk management. Effective January 1, 2018, Maryland’s data breach notification law was amended to not only require companies to notify victims within 45 days of a data breach but also expand the definition of “personal information.”

Could We Ultimately See an “American GDPR”?

However, the lack of progress on a federal level doesn’t mean U.S. companies should assume that we will never see an “American version” of the GDPR on a federal level. The New York Times recently reported on businesses that do not accept cash as a form of payment. While these are isolated incidents, they are a sign of the rapid digitization of our society. Consumers are seeing more and more of their personal information being preserved for posterity in digital files kept by a dizzying array of government entities and private-sector organizations, with almost no control over where it goes or what happens to it. Even minors’ information is stored digitally, and children can easily become victims of identity theft.

Businesses, meanwhile, are struggling to stay abreast of an ever-changing compliance landscape complicated by the fact that while states have borders, ecommerce does not. This forces businesses that sell in multiple states to reconcile a confusing patchwork of regulations, some of which contradict each other. Depending on individual states to regulate data breach notification and data privacy is rapidly becoming untenable, and the federal government will eventually be forced to step in, as it did with HIPAA in the 1990s.

In the meantime, the best option for businesses is to adopt a data-centric, integrated risk management approach to ensure they have control of their data and are able to quickly adapt to changing regulations.

The cyber security experts at Lazarus Alliance have deep knowledge of the cyber security field, are continually monitoring the latest information security threats, and are committed to protecting organizations of all sizes from security breaches. Our full-service risk assessment services and Continuum GRC RegTech software will help protect your organization from data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cyber threats.

Lazarus Alliance is proactive cyber security®. Call 1-888-896-7580 to discuss your organization’s cyber security needs and find out how we can help your organization adhere to cyber security regulations, maintain compliance, and secure your systems.