************ Disclosure: Our family is one of the “tens of millions” of Americans that may be affected by the Anthem data breach announced last year. ************ One of the repeating themes at this year’s annual Black Hat cybersecurity conference was the idea that cyber threats in general are now moving rapidly beyond the “prototype” phase into full scale production. One way that becomes apparent is by looking for datasets that are for sale on what’s known as the “dark web” using tools that are specifically designed to buy (or sell) anything with industrial strength anonymity. Most of us have no need or use for this murky portion of the web because it’s rife with criminals selling drugs, illegal porn and now – software source code that has a significant footprint inside healthcare. In fact, the dark web isn’t really accessible through a standard browser for this reason. Standard browsers are too easy to track and trace – down to a specific IP address and (potentially) username. Using a browser known as The Onion Router (TOR – estimated to have about 3M users ) the browser traffic and users can be effectively anonymized with industrial strength. When combined with cybercurrencies like Bitcoin, anonymous accounts can then launder money for any number of criminal activities – including drug sales, illegal porn and lucrative datasets obtained illegally. Obviously a single data record has limited value, but large data sets – with enough individual detail – can attract (in theory) big money. Earlier this month, the Chief Intelligence Officer for InfoArmor – Andrew Komarov – came across a listing on the dark web that raised the stakes considerably in healthcare’s ongoing battle with cybercriminals. I checked the URL and it’s still active today on a dark website known as AlphaBay Market. AlphaBay Market […]
