News Insights: Theft of sensitive data for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers

New Yorker’s are being warned by New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS) about ongoing attacks that have already resulted in theft of sensitive data for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. On February 16, the DFS released a Cyber Fraud Alert identifying a systemic and aggressive cybercrime campaign to steal driver’s license numbers (“DLNs”), from public-facing Instant Quote Websites.  Since the February 16 Alert, DFS has received many additional reports of data theft – including some as recent as the past week https://www.dfs.ny.gov/industry_guidance/industry_letters/il20210330_cyber_alert_followup

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James McQuiggan, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, commented, “Cyber criminals will take any information they can leverage and work to get the next bit of data. The result is identity theft to profit and sell it on the black market like the dark web. Organizations need to ensure they are protecting all data exposed to the internet with additional authentication, namely multi-factor authentication. While it can still be bypassed using extreme measures, it can slow down the less capable cyber criminals from gaining further information.”