Author: CorruptionLedger

Latitude Financial has revealed it has been hit by a sophisticated and malicious cyberattack that has compromised a total of 328,000 separate pieces of data that it had sourced from its customers. The loans, credit card and insurance provider said it had detected unusual activity on its systems over the last few days that was believed to have originated from a major vendor used by Latitude.

The company said the attacker appeared to have used employee login credentials to steal personal information that was being held by two other of Latitude’s service providers. In a statement to the ASX on Thursday morning, Latitude said approximately 103,000 identifications documents – 97% of which were drivers’ licences – were stolen from the first service provider, while 225,000 customer records were stolen from a second service provider.

Regulators, policymakers and bankers are looking at the role that digital messaging and social media may have played in the collapse, and whether banks are entering an age when the psychological behavior behind a bank run — mass fear from depositors of losing their savings — may be amplified and go viral quicker than bank officers and regulators can successfully respond.

Privacy technology company OneTrust announced a series of changes to its board of directors and governance structure Wednesday, which it says positions the company for future growth. 

Under the revised governance arrangement, CEO Kabir Barday, CIPP/E, CIPP/US, CIPM, CIPT, FIP, will be joined by Coatue Management’s Thomas Laffont and Insight Partners’ Richard Wells. Current board members Alan Dabbiere, David Dabbiere and John Marshall will depart from the board, which now seeks “four new independent board members resulting in a majority-independent board of seven people,” according to the company’s press release. 

“Today, we have a clear path forward, strong investor demand, and the capital to support this last phase as a private company,” Barday said in comments provided to The Privacy Advisor. 

An American intelligence drone crashed after colliding with a Russian fighter over the Black Sea on Tuesday, the U.S. Air Force’s European headquarters said in a release.

The MQ-9 Reaper drone was flying a routine surveillance mission in international airspace when it crossed paths with two Su-27 fighters around 7 a.m. local time, according to U.S. Air Forces in Europe.

The Russian jets began antagonizing the unmanned aircraft, repeatedly dumping fuel on and buzzing in front of the much smaller Reaper, the Air Force said. One Su-27 drew close enough to hit the drone’s tail propeller, causing its remote operators to lose control of the plane.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) will not affect China’s financial system but offers an important lesson for the country’s banking industry, the official Securities Times has said.

An SVB-style bank failure is unlikely to happen in China but the incident would have “important implications for the development of China’s small- and medium-sized lenders, and the stability of China’s financial system”, the media outlet said in an editorial on Wednesday.

SVB’s shutdown on Friday has roiled global markets, forced US President Joe Biden to rush out assurances that the financial system is safe and prompted emergency US measures giving banks access to more funding.

A Southfield, Michigan-headquartered bank holding company has agreed to plead guilty to securities fraud for filing false securities statements relating to its 2017 initial public offering (IPO) and its 2018 and 2019 annual filings.

According to a signed plea agreement that will be publicly filed in court, Sterling Bancorp, Inc. (the Company) was the holding company for its wholly owned subsidiary, Sterling Bank and Trust F.S.B. (the Bank, or together with the Company, “Sterling”). Sterling – with branches located in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, and Southfield – completed an IPO in 2017, and the Company’s stock began trading on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol “SBT.”

The notorious Emotet botnet, considered one of the biggest threats to internet security, has resurfaced after a prolonged hiatus, armed with new tactics. The botnet’s trademark strategy of sending spam messages that appear to be from a known contact, addressing recipients by name and purporting to respond to existing email threads, was observed again last week after a four-month break.

Previous resumptions of activity have seen Emotet deploy fresh techniques to avoid endpoint security products and deceive users into clicking on links or enabling dangerous macros in Microsoft Office attachments.

Antonov met with Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Karen Donfried, who protested the “unsafe and unprofessional intercept” of the drone that resulted in its loss. “We consider this incident a provocation,” Antonov told reporters after the meeting. He said he told Donfried that US drones, planes and ships had no business being that close to Russian borders. “Could you imagine what the reaction of the US media or the Pentagon would be, if such a drone…

CHISINAU, Moldova — On Friday, John Kirby, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, made a surprise announcement at a White House press briefing. U.S. intelligence, he said, had determined that the Kremlin was plotting to topple another European democracy. “Russian actors, some with current ties to Russian intelligence, are seeking to stage and use protests in Moldova as a basis to foment a manufactured insurrection against the Moldovan government,” Kirby declared. As if on schedule, Moldova experienced an antigovernment…

Senators on Tuesday called Russia’s downing of a U.S. drone “dangerous” and “reckless,” slamming Russian President Vladimir Putin but stopping short of calling for any specific actions.

A Russian fighter jet intercepted the drone over the Black Sea.

“This intercept was so dangerous and so brazen that the U.S. Air Force was forced to crash their drone into international waters. It is another reckless act by President Putin and his military, and I want to tell Mr. Putin, stop this behavior before you are the cause of an unintended escalation,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said from the chamber floor.

The country’s inflation has not surpassed 100 percent in over three decades, as value of Argentina’s currency plummets.

Portuguese tourist Fabio Figueirado wanted to admire beautiful buildings on a romantic getaway in Paris, but instead he and his girlfriend have found themselves navigating pavements piled high…

The United States, Australia and the United Kingdom are traveling “further down the wrong and dangerous path for their own geopolitical self-interest,” China’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday, responding…

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Germany’s response to the explosion on North Sea pipelines showed that the country remained “occupied” and unable to act independently decades after its surrender at the end of World War II.

Putin, interviewed on Russian television, also said European leaders had been browbeaten into losing their sense of sovereignty and independence.

Western countries, including Germany, have reacted cautiously to investigations into the blasts which hit Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines last year, saying they believe they were a deliberate act, but declining to say who they think was responsible.

Taiwan unveiled its first portable attack drone on Tuesday, an unmanned aerial vehicle similar to a U.S. model used in Ukraine’s fight against Russia, as China steps up…

Facebook parent Meta is slashing 10,000 jobs, about as many as the social media company announced late last year in its first round of cuts, as uncertainly about the global economy hits the technology sector particularly hard.

The company announced 11,000 job cuts in November, about 13% of its workforce at the time. In addition to the layoffs, Meta said Tuesday that it would not fill 5,000 open positions.

Meta and other tech companies have been hiring aggressively for at least two years and in recent months have begun to let some of those workers go. Hiring in the U.S. is still strong, but layoffs have hit hard in some sectors.