News of the Cyber World

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Italy Suffers Widespread Internet Outages

Thousands of Telecom Italia (TIM) customers across Italy complained of internet outages and glitches on Sunday which the company blamed on problems with an international link.

Users from the northern city of Milan to the Sicilian capital Palermo reported problems, with the issue mainly focused on fixed-line internet services.

Some soccer fans bemoaned interruptions to their streaming of the Serie A game between Spezia and league leaders Napoli.
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Italy’s national cybersecurity agency said a “massive attack using an already circulating ransomware” has been detected by the computer security incident response team, Italy’s ANSA news agency reported.

TIM, the former national telecoms monopoly, is at the center of a takeover struggle, with private equity group KKR having made a non-binding bid to buy its network.

GoodRx will settle claim it shared sensitive health data with advertisers

GoodRx, a telehealth provider and online platform selling discounted prescription drugs, will pay $1.5 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission complaint that it failed to disclose to consumers it was sharing health data with Facebook, Google and other ad-targeting companies.

The FTC alleged that since at least 2017 GoodRx shared the sensitive health information of millions of consumers — including users’ prescription medications and health conditions — with third-party advertising companies and platforms despite promising users it wouldn’t share such data. Affected users were subsequently targeted by advertisements based on personal health data that they believed remained confidential.

The complaint is the first enforcement action the FTC has taken under its Health Breach notification rule, which requires certain entities not covered by HIPAA to notify customers and the FTC if there’s a breach of individually identifiable health information. The FTC voted in September 2021 to clarify that the rule applies to any unauthorized use of data, not just breaches.

According to the FTC complaint, GoodRx also exploited sensitive customer information for its own advertising purposes, uploading user information to Facebook for advertising campaigns that targeted users based on specific medications and health conditions.
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In addition to disclosing sensitive information to third parties, the FTC alleges that GoodRx misrepresented compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and failed to provide users with a sufficient written privacy policy.

While entering into a settlement with the FTC, GoodRX maintains it did nothing wrong.

Oh no! They did nothing wrong by  selling your private data to the Big Tech...