American fashion brand and retailer GUESS is notifying affected customers of a data breach following a February ransomware attack that led to data theft.
“A cybersecurity forensic firm was engaged to assist with the investigation and identified unauthorized access to GUESS’ systems between February 2, 2021 and February 23, 2021,” the company said in a breach notification letter mailed to impacted customers.
Guess was the victim of a ransomware attack in February.
“On May 26, 2021, the investigation determined that personal information related to certain individuals may have been accessed or acquired by an unauthorized actor.”
GUESS directly operates 1,041 retail stores in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and its distributors and partners another 539 additional stores worldwide as of May 2021. The stores part of GUESS’ retail network currently operate in roughly 100 countries around the world.
The fashion retailer identified the addresses of all impacted individuals after completing a full review of the documents stored on breached systems on June 3, 2021.
GUESS began mailing breach notification letters to affected customers on June 9, offering complimentary identity theft protection services and one year of free credit monitoring through Experian to all impacted individuals.
According to the breach notifications mailed on Friday, information exposed in the attack includes personal and financial data.
“On May 26, 2021, the investigation determined that personal information related to certain individuals may have been accessed or acquired by an unauthorized actor,” GUESS said.
“The investigation determined that Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers and/or financial account numbers may have been accessed or acquired.”
While the breach notification letters do not reveal the number of affected individuals, information filed with the office of Maine’s Attorney General shows that just over 1,300 people had their data exposed or accessed during the February attack.
The filed breach info also reveals that the information acquired during the incident includes “Financial Account Number or Credit/Debit Card Number (in combination with security code, access code, password or PIN for the account).”
GUESS has implemented additional measures to boost its security protocols and is cooperating with law enforcement as part of an ongoing incident investigation.
Our mission for 2021 is to end ransomware threats.
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As GUESS will find out, the costs of a cyberattack far exceed just the ransomware payout. Dealing with the aftermath of a ransomware attack can be complicated, time consuming and disruptive. The vast majority of organizations experienced significant business impact due to ransomware attacks, including loss of revenue (66%), damage to the organization’s brand (53%), unplanned workforce reductions (29%), and potentially even closure of the business altogether (25%).
After an organization experienced a ransomware attack, the top 5 solutions implemented included security awareness training (48%), security operations (SOC) (48%), endpoint protection (44%), data backup and recovery (43%), and email scanning (41%). The least deployed solutions post-attack included web scanning (40%), endpoint detection and response (EDR) and extended detection and response (XDR) technologies (38%), antivirus software (38%), mobile and SMS security solutions (36%), and managed security services provider (MSSP) or managed detection and response (MDR) provider (34%). Only 3% of respondents said they did not make any new security investments after a ransomware attack.
To us at BLAKFX, none of the statistics are surprising. We set out to eliminate the threat of ransomware and other cyber attacks years ago. Our CEO, Robert Statica, was the technology founder of Wickr and his devotion to cyber security inspired him to create the Helix22 data security SDK.
Ransomware Auditing as a Service (RaaS): as ransomware attacks have skyrocket, they have come to represent the biggest threat to the data of government agencies, military, intelligence agencies as well as private enterprises. BLAKFX developed the first in the world Ransomware Auditing as a Service (RaaS) platform which allows our cyber security engineers to scan your network and simulate real-world ransomware attacks to determine the test the prevention, detection and mitigation strategies of your organization and establish how resilient your network is to real ransomware attacks. After the scan we provide a comprehensive report and our recommendations for remediation.
If you are the victim of an actual ransomware attack, we are able to recover the data that has been hi-jacked during the attack and due to Helix22’s patented DNA BindingTM cryptography, restore it to its original state.
D2D encryption:
We can make this restoration claim as the tech engineers at BLAKFX invented and patented a genuine device2device (D2D) encryption. We manage data security transmission through the truly brilliant and also patented universal Helix22 key service. The Helix22 encryption originates on your network or device, not just when the app is opened. This means, that when data arrives to our key server, it is already encrypted so all it needs to do is issue another key. Signal and Telegram cannot claim this level of security. This key will then only work with the intended device, which generates a matching key required to open the data. In this protocol, we are truly a “zero-knowledge” server so your communications and transmissions remain completely top secret. Even in the event that BLAKFX were subpoenaed, we can honor the request by just handing over the encrypted content…as that is literally all we have. Helix22 also only use keys just one-time and then destroys them. This way the data security is future forward prefect. Therefore, in our unique user-to-user encryption (U2U) world, there is no opportunity at all for any data leak.
This same protocol just described, can be the same with all your 3rd party vendors and suppliers. It does not matter in the least what platform they are running or what device they are using or even the type of data, it is all 100% protected. We do however, strongly advise that all firms involved be utilizing Helix22 due to the nature of the data content. Helix22 can ensure that whatever data they are generating is protected as well.
Let’s take it a step further. Even if your organization were a victim of an internal attack or a victim of malicious open source downloads, there is no reason for concern. Any data that has been forwarded, downloaded, copied or saved cannot be exfiltrated. Period. We have the technology industries foremost data packets which are protected with multi-layered, military grade encryption algorithms that have already proven the ability to withstand penetration testing from MI5 and quantum computing attacks.
One final practical genius of DNA BindingTM is in that it is immediately compatible with whichever system or software you are utilizing. Therefore, any organization can forward information to another and then discuss it and there is immediate privacy.
Finally, the Helix22 encryption is quantum computing ready so no need to redo all your data security methodologies in a couple of years when everything else becomes obsolete.
In the BLAKFX data security world, ransomware or any other data centric attack cannot have any affect on your systems or data.
The Helix22 data security SDK accomplishes the following:
- Protects all your firms data at rest, in use and in transit
- Renders ransomware threats obsolete
- Eliminates human error
- Eliminates all malicious or interior attacks
- Verifies original content i.e. minimizes the threat of impersonation attacks and deep fakes
- Reduces latency
- Installs with 5 lines of code
- Runs on any platform, network, device and in any programming language
- Provides perfect future/forward secrecy
- Delivers “zero-knowledge” encryption
- Compatible with all cloud, 3rd party and vendor services
- Ensures privacy and security for blockchain and all cryptocurrency transactions
- Is quantum ready – so there’s no need to upgrade when the time comes
- Requires no employee training
- Exceeds all gov’t and banking standards
- Meets compliance regulations
The new era of data security is one that requires new solutions. The era of perimeter defenses is over as it is proving impossible to keep hackers from breaching the perimeter and accessing data. Further E2E encryption based on old models of RSA cryptography are obsolete as quantum computing becomes mainstream.
Our Motto
In Math We Trust
BLAKFX is Based on Success
Our founders, Robert Statica PhD and Kara Coppa, also founded Wickr, which is used by the US military and has never been hacked since its inception in 2012. The Helix22 data security SDK is several generations enhanced since then. Dr. Statica also delivered the encryption for the world’s most secure phone, Katim.
Founder – Robert Statica PhD Founder – Kara Coppa Founder – Alex Maslov MS, MBA
Co-Founders of Wickr KatimTM Ultra Secure Smartphone
