Weekly Cybersecurity Recap May 19

Major data breaches seem to be occurring more and more frequently, and we have some huge names on the list of impacted companies this week, including the US Government, Toyota, and Intel. We were also concerned with services in our hospitals and our schools being breached, giving up patient, student, and teacher data in the process through the breach of companies like SchoolDude and NextGen Healthcare. Between all these different important companies, millions of people lost their data, and many will experience some serious security issues as a result. Learn more about any of the breaches impacting you in our quick recap of some of the most important data breaches from this week. 

Government DOT

Early last week, more than 237,000 government employees that depend on the TRANServe reimbursement program had their data exposed in a breach. We don't know what data was taken from these individuals specifically, but we do know it was personal and that everyone involved will receive a personal notice explaining the breach in more detail to them. This latest attack shows that the US Government isn't immune to cyber-attacks and that even government employees can be exposed to attacks if they aren't careful. 

Toyota

It's recently come to our attention that more than 2 Million Toyota vehicle owners have had their location information exposed to the general public for more than the last ten years. Any Toyota owners relying on GBook, GLink, or T-Connect data services have had their location data exposed starting on January 2, 2012, and continuing until April 17, 2023. During that decade, data about your location and times of arrival and departure were available online. There was no personally identifiable information on these data reports other than vehicle VINs, which means it's unlikely that people were using the database to track individuals, but this is still concerning. 

Intel

Earlier this year, Micro-Star International suffered from a major data breach that exposed more than 1.5 TB of source code and confidential company and software data. This exposed the tech giant to serious security vulnerabilities, and some of those vulnerabilities now involve the tech-giant Intel. Intel includes a boot guard security feature on all the devices containing its chips, and 116 different MSI devices with Intel chips are now exposed because of this breach. That means hackers can create custom malware that can be added to these MSI devices more easily than ever. If you have an MSI product with an Intel chipset, you should take extra precautions to protect yourself because you could be at risk of being hacked more than ever. 

SchoolDude

SchoolDude, a cloud-based work management tool for school districts, was recently hit by a data breach that exposed more than 3 million separate user accounts. During the breach, email addresses, phone numbers, full names, school districts, account passwords, and more were released for each of the users on the program. The stolen email addresses and passwords could be used in an attempt to access other services on the internet, including emails, crypto wallets, bank accounts, eWallet services, and much more. If you were hit by this breach in April and you reuse passwords regularly, you should start changing any account passwords that share the same password with your SchoolDude account to protect yourself. 

NextGen Healthcare

This large online healthcare records service provider NextGen Healthcare was hacked, and more than 1 million patient records were made available to attackers in a recent data breach. This breach began on March 29, 2023, and lasted until April 14, 2023. During the breach, personal patient data was stolen, including Social Security numbers, home addresses, birth dates, and names. This data can be used to launch effective identity theft attacks at the victims, and it's a serious issue that NextGen Healthcare patients should watch out for. If you believe you're impacted by this breach, you should take steps to protect your credit and watch for odd activity you must respond to in order to protect yourself.