Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Incident Response

Stratfor to Settle Class Action Lawsuit With e-Books and Subscriptions

Strategic Forecasting Inc. (Stratfor), a Texas-based intelligence firm that delivers paid briefings on a wide range of topics, suffered a pre-Christmas breach at the hands of AntiSec.

Strategic Forecasting Inc. (Stratfor), a Texas-based intelligence firm that delivers paid briefings on a wide range of topics, suffered a pre-Christmas breach at the hands of AntiSec.

The attack on Stratfor led to the loss of internal emails, which were then used to further the embarrassment the firm suffered, as their private speculations and data gathering sources were made public. Moreover, customer credit card information was exposed hanks to poor protection mechanisms, leading to 60,000 hijacked accounts and more than $700,000 in losses. The item of not that ensured that the breach was forced into the spotlight however, was the release of 860,160 account passwords and email addresses. It is within that large dump of data that the credit cards were discovered.

One customer sued Stratfor over the breach, and a settlement proposed earlier this year was given the green light this month by a U.S. District Court Judge in Long Island. Under the proposed terms of the settlement, which will have a final approval and fairness hearing this September, Stratfor will admit to no wrong doing, fault, or violation of law, nor will they admit to any liability of any kind.

In exchange, class members who opt in to the lawsuit (anyone who was a current for former customer as of 24 December 2011) will receive one free month of access to Stratfor’s paid subscription service ($30), a e-book titled The Blue Book, which was published by Stratfor ($13), as well as additional credit monitoring for those who request it. Moreover, Stratfor would have to purchase additional network protections, pay $400,000 in attorney fees, and share any amount recovered from their insurance company, if any.

The FBI arrested Jeremy Hammond, former LulzSec member and alleged mastermind of the Stratfor hack, earlier this year. He pled not guilty to charges against him in May, when he appeared before a judge in Manhattan. He was returned to custody after his appearance, and is scheduled to return to court on July 23.

Written By

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

SecurityWeek’s Threat Detection and Incident Response Summit brings together security practitioners from around the world to share war stories on breaches, APT attacks and threat intelligence.

Register

Securityweek’s CISO Forum will address issues and challenges that are top of mind for today’s security leaders and what the future looks like as chief defenders of the enterprise.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Data Breaches

LastPass DevOp engineer's home computer hacked and implanted with keylogging malware as part of a sustained cyberattack that exfiltrated corporate data from the cloud...

Application Security

GitHub this week announced the revocation of three certificates used for the GitHub Desktop and Atom applications.

Data Breaches

GoTo said an unidentified threat actor stole encrypted backups and an encryption key for a portion of that data during a 2022 breach.

Incident Response

Microsoft has rolled out a preview version of Security Copilot, a ChatGPT-powered tool to help organizations automate cybersecurity tasks.

Incident Response

Meta has developed a ten-phase cyber kill chain model that it believes will be more inclusive and more effective than the existing range of...

Artificial Intelligence

Two new surveys stress the need for automation and AI – but one survey raises the additional specter of the growing use of bring...

Application Security

Password management firm LastPass says the hackers behind an August data breach stole a massive stash of customer data, including password vault data that...