Giant US insurer admits second data hack  April 3rd 2024

Giant US insurer admits second data hack

Tens of thousands affected

Prudential Insurance has announced that hackers stole the information of more than 36,000 people in a February breach.

In a regulatory filing in Maine, Prudential’s law firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, said the insurer detected unauthorized access to its network on Feb. 5, according to a report by The Record.

“Through the investigation, we learned that the unauthorized third party gained access to our network on February 4, 2024, and removed a small percentage of personal information from our system,” the filing said.

According to Prudential, the names, addresses, and driver’s license or ID card numbers of 36,545 people were accessed. The company has notified law enforcement of the breach and hired an outside cybersecurity firm to assist in its response.

Specialty insurer gives Trump his fraud bond

Billionaire boss is known for high interest-high risk auto loans

Thanks to a specialty insurer, Donald Trump has secured a $175 million bond in connection with his ongoing civil fraud case in New York, effectively pausing the collection efforts against him for the $454 million judgment awarded.

Knight Specialty Insurance, operating under the broader Knight Insurance Group, is the underwriter for Trump’s appellate bond.

Don Hankey, the billionaire chairman of the Knight Insurance Group, communicated to The Associated Press that a combination of cash and bonds served as collateral for the bond. Hankey is known for his ventures in high-risk, high-interest loans to auto buyers with less-than-perfect credit.

“This is what we do at Knight Insurance, and we’re happy to do this for anyone who needs a bond,” Hankey said, also explaining that he has had no personal interactions with Trump.

Established in 2013, Knight Specialty Insurance is a B++ (AM Best) rated primary insurer. Its parent group has $23.4 billion in assets worldwide and is part of the Hankey Group of Companies

State Farm® expands Ting fire safety program to 2 million homes

State Farm continues to innovate for homeowners as it expands its free offer of Ting sensor technology, helping to protect families and homes from electrical hazards that could cause a fire.

State Farm is pleased to announce the expansion of the Ting fire safety program as part of its longstanding commitment to fostering safer homes and communities, offering eligible customers more than 2 million smart sensors for free. With this program expansion, State Farm continues to lead the industry with the largest free distribution of smart home technology to help predict and prevent losses and ultimately save lives.

With increasing reliance on electronics, devices, and the power grid at large, the occurrence of electrical fires has steadily risen, according to national data from FEMA, resulting in a fire in a U.S. home every ten minutes.

Since 2020, State Farm has collaborated with Whisker Labs to combat this risk with a simple, plug-in sensor that monitors a home for dangerous arcing, the precursor to most electrical fires. Beyond its ability to detect and therefore help prevent electrical fires, Ting also offers additional benefits like power outage and dangerous utility power notifications, frozen pipe prevention, and more.

Cloudflare using lava lamps for secure SSL/TLS encryption

Cybersecurity is only as strong as the random data sources creating encryption keys. True randomness is found in the chaotic physical world.

Secure encryptions require truly unpredictable numbers to prevent cybercriminals from figuring out the code and decrypting data. Even the most advanced computer system will still produce predictable, logical outputs because computers are designed to do so, but predictability equals liability in cybersecurity. Some companies are turning to the physical world to find chaotic data. Among them is Cloudflare, Inc., a global company providing internet hyperconnectivity for millions, which uses a wall of 100 lava lamps to produce stronger encryption keys.

“Computers are bad at being random,” said John Graham-Cumming, chief technology officer at Cloudflare. “To make the encryption we rely on to use the internet, we need random numbers. One way to get random numbers is to look at randomness in nature. One of the ways we do that is by taking pictures of the motion of the colored blobs in a wall of lava lamps. Their motion is not predictable. The pictures are then ‘hashed’ to produce a number that can be fed into our random number generators to give them a truly random starting point, called the ‘seed.’”

Wall of entropy

The movement of “lava” (or paraffin wax) inside lava lamps never forms the same shape twice, making these decorations an unpredictable data source for secure encryptions. At Cloudflare headquarters in San Francisco, a mounted camera is pointed at the lava lamp wall, named the “Wall of Entropy.” The camera captures images at timed intervals, which are saved as a series of numbers, with each pixel given a numerical value. This process creates a random string of numbers that Cloudflare’s services use to create secure encryption keys, but Cloudflare isn’t the first to use lava lamps — Silicon Graphics used a similar “Lavarand” system in 1996.

US traffic deaths fell 3.6% in 2023, the 2nd straight yearly drop. But nearly 41,000 people died

U.S. traffic deaths fell 3.6% last year, but still, almost 41,000 people were killed on the nation’s roadways, according to full-year estimates by safety regulators.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it was the second year in a row that fatalities decreased. The agency also released final numbers for 2022 on Monday, saying that 42,514 people died in crashes.

NHTSA Deputy Administrator Sophie Shulman said that traffic deaths declined in the fourth quarter of last year, marking the seventh straight quarterly drop that started with the second quarter of 2022.

The declines come even though people are driving more. Federal Highway Administration estimates show that Americans drove 67.5 billion more miles last year than the previous year, a 2.1% increase. The death rate per 100 million miles driven fell to 1.26 last year, down from 1.33 in 2022, NHTSA said.