Ars Technica: Effective, fast, and unrecoverable: Wiper malware is popping up everywhere. “Over the past year, a flurry of destructive wiper malware from no fewer than nine families has appeared. In the past week, researchers cataloged at least two more, both exhibiting advanced codebases designed to inflict maximum damage.”
Tapei Times: Control Yuan to investigate mass data loss at PTS . “Two Control Yuan members are to investigate the deletion of about 424,000 news clips at Public Television Service (PTS), in an incident that exposed cybersecurity issues at government agencies. PTS on Tuesday said that a contractor on Feb. 8 mistakenly deleted news clips produced between 2017 and January from its digital archive. Although more than 320,000 clips were recovered by Friday last week, nearly 80,000 were lost, the network said.”
Bleeping Computer: University loses 77TB of research data due to backup error. “The Kyoto University in Japan has lost about 77TB of research data due to an error in the backup system of its Hewlett-Packard supercomputer. The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, 2021, and resulted in 34 million files from 14 research groups being wiped from the system and the backup file.”
NBC DFW: Case Files Affected in Dallas Police Department Data Loss. “Multiple terabytes of Dallas Police Department data are missing and may be unrecoverable after being deleted during a data migration process in April, according to the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office. District Attorney John Creuzot said in a disclosure notice to defense attorneys Wednesday that the city had learned in April that 22TB of data were deleted between March 31 and April 5 during the migration of a police department network drive.”
BBC: MySpace admits losing 12 years’ worth of music uploads. “MySpace, one of the first online social networks, has apologised after a server migration caused a huge loss of data. A message on its website says that ‘any photos, videos and audio files’ uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available.”
The Register: Ever used VFEmail? No? Well, chances are you never will now: Hackers wipe servers, backups in ‘catastrophic’ attack. “A hacker wiped every server and backup of VFEmail this week in a ‘catastrophic’ attack, according to the webmail service. VFEmail admins detailed the network intrusion on Monday in a grim red-letter update on the site’s front page. The service’s founder Rick Romero also said it’s likely the webmail outfit is toast as a result of the ransacking.”
ZDNet: Windows 10 October update delete your files? This tool might recover them. “For some unknown reason, moving up to Windows 10 version 1809 may delete all the files in user folders. The folders remain, but the files within them are gone, leaving users in potentially a worse pickle than ransomware victims experience. However, there is a chance that early Windows 10 upgraders who encountered this problem might be able to recover lost files by using the free version of Avast-owned Recuva recovery software.”
BetaNews: Top 5 free data recovery tools for Windows. “In a sense it can be hard to judge the quality of a data recovery app. To a large degree success rates are determined by the quality of the data that you’re trying to recover. If you’re relying on software to get your data back, you will have to accept that there are some situations that apps simply cannot cope with — such as when data has been overwritten numerous times, or in the case of severe physical damage. You may still be able to get your data back by calling in the experts, but this can be an expensive option. It makes perfect sense to try going down the free route first of all, so here — in no particular order, as different situations require different apps — are five free data recovery tools that might just do the trick…”
The Register: More data lost or stolen in first half of 2017 than the whole of last year. “More data records were leaked or stolen by miscreants during the first half of 2017 (1.9 billion) than all of 2016 (1.37 billion). Digital security company Gemalto’s Breach Level Index (PDF), published Wednesday, found that an average of 10.4 million records are exposed or swiped every day.”
The Register: Surprising nobody, lawyers line up to sue the crap out of Equifax. “Less than 24 hours after credit monitors Equifax revealed it had lost the personal data of more than 130 million Americans, two class action suits have been filed. The suits, separately filed in the Portland, Oregon and North Georgia US District Courts, accuse the credit reporting company of negligence and violations of the US Fair Credit Reporting Act.”
Ars Technica: Why the Equifax breach is very possibly the worst leak of personal info ever. “By providing full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers, it provided most of the information banks, insurance companies, and other businesses use to confirm consumers are who they claim to be. The theft, by criminals who exploited a security flaw on the Equifax website, opens the troubling prospect the data is now in the hands of hostile governments, criminal gangs, or both and will remain so indefinitely.”
Drivesavers Data Recovery: Drivesavers Upgrades Its Free Data Recovery Offer To Include Hurricane Irma Victims. ” DriveSavers, the worldwide leader in data recovery, eDiscovery and digital forensic solutions, today announced it will provide free data recovery services to Florida residents who lose data as a result of hurricane Irma…. Because exposure to water and air cause corrosion on electronic circuitry, customers must contact DriveSavers and ship their device no later than September 30, 2017. There is a limit of one device per business or household. Customers needing additional recoveries, and those with multi-disk devices such as RAID, NAS and SAN devices, are eligible for a 50 percent discount off the regular service fees. DriveSavers will accept as many water-damaged devices that it can. However, it may limit the number of free recoveries based on the company’s workload, cost of parts and availability of personnel.”
MakeUseOf: How to Restore Recovered Photos Using EXIF Metadata. “Data loss is a massive blow, but once you’ve recovered your missing data, sorting it out is invariably time consuming. If the data loss was due to an accidental partition deletion on your computer’s hard disk drive (HDD) you’ll typically have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of images to filter…. But will it be as bad as you think? When it comes to digital photos, probably not. Thanks to EXIF metadata stored in the image file, it’s possible to sort through all of the recovered images to find what you’re looking for relatively quickly.”
Neowin: Microsoft sued over Windows 10 ‘destroying user data and damaging PCs’. “The case has been certified as a class-action lawsuit filed in Chicago’s US District Court on behalf of every user who upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10. The attorneys of the trio claim that their clients were affected by the aforementioned issues within 30 days after upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and that similar issues plague ‘hundreds of thousands’ of users.”
Happens to the best of us: Google lost some data in a lightning strike. “Google says data has been wiped from discs at one of its data centres in Belgium – after it was struck by lightning four times. Some people have permanently lost access to their files as a result. A number of disks damaged following the lightning strikes did, however, later became accessible.”
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