Verizon is laying off approximately 165 employees in Washington state, including analysts, engineers and retail workers.

The layoffs were disclosed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed with the state’s Employment Security Department. The jobs are slated to end Jan. 23.

“Verizon is consolidating and restructuring its operations to maximize the utilization of company facilities and resources,” Eboni Gregoire, Verizon’s director of HR operations, said in a WARN letter.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that New York-based Verizon was planning to cut 15,000 workers, primarily through layoffs. That includes shifting about 200 of its stores into franchised outlets, which removes employees from the telecom’s payroll.

The WARN letter states that five facilities — in Redmond, Renton, Woodinville, Spokane and Bellingham are “being divested to an agent” and will no longer be operated by Verizon. It was unclear if the sites would close or become a franchise.

Approximately 22 of the workers being laid off are based at a corporate office in Bellevue, Wash., that Verizon took over from rival T-Mobile last year. T-Mobile, headquartered in Bellevue, sublet 32,682 square feet of space to Verizon at 90 North, a building located at 3255 160th Ave. SE., the Puget Sound Business Journal previously reported.

The layoffs come as Verizon lost 7,000 phone subscribers in the most recent quarter, while AT&T and T-Mobile have been adding customers, WSJ reported. On Thursday, T-Mobile announced a “Switching Made Easy” initiative launching next month to help Verizon and AT&T customers switch to T-Mobile in as little as 15 minutes.

Editor’s note: The number of workers impacted by the layoffs was off by three in the original story and was corrected Nov. 25.

From border security to veteran care, federal agencies are transforming how they serve the public — with AI, cloud platforms and human-centered design leading the way.

Explore how leaders from CBP, DoD, USPS and VA are driving innovation, improving trust and putting people at the center of every mission.

You’ll hear from:

• Barbara Morton, VA
• Janet Pence, CBP
• Bill Tinston, FEHRM Office
• Ken Gonzalez, Verizon

Read the full Federal News Network Executive Briefing and see how tech is powering better experiences for employees and citizens alike.

The post How CBP, DoD, USPS and VA transform services through human-centered design first appeared on Federal News Network.

This move changes how Americans reach 911 across half a million square miles where traditional towers do not reach.

The post T-Mobile Makes 911 Satellite Texting Free for All Carriers appeared first on TechRepublic.

This move changes how Americans reach 911 across half a million square miles where traditional towers do not reach.

The post T-Mobile Makes 911 Satellite Texting Free for All Carriers appeared first on TechRepublic.

By Kim Crawley

The annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report is a wealth of valuable information about the state of cybersecurity today.

Of course, data breaches remain one of the biggest problems in cybersecurity. Many of the worst breaches expose financial data, authentication credentials, and sensitive legal and medical information. In the wrong hands, this data can help cybercriminals access organizations’ and individuals’ most sensitive data and valuable networks.

Ransomware that targets enterprises is also growing. In fact, ransomware incidents are up 13 percent from the previous year, a larger increase than the previous five years combined. Another data breach vulnerability trend is an increase in human exploitation, whether by phishing, stolen credentials or user errors.

The DBIR is a massive report that resulted from Verizon analyzing a large number of data breaches, which they’ve also verified directly for authenticity. Here’s how Verizon determines which breaches to include:

“The incident must have at least seven enumerations (e.g., threat actor variety, threat action category, variety of integrity loss, et al.) across 34 fields or be a DDoS attack. Exceptions are given to confirmed data breaches with less than seven enumerations. The incident must have at least one known VERIS threat action category (hacking, malware, etc.).”

Verizon acknowledges that many data breaches still go undetected. Nonetheless, as organizations improve their systems for detecting indications of compromise (IOCs), there’s a lot of useful data to be analyzed.

Here are five key findings:

1. Web application “hacking” and denial of service attacks are the most common actions that threat actors perform in order to unlawfully access sensitive data in networks. For the sake of the report, hacking is defined as “attempts to intentionally access or harm information assets without (or exceeding) authorization by circumventing or thwarting logical security mechanisms.”
2. Seventy percent of breaches involve web application hacking, 45 percent involve denial of service, 15 percent involve backdoor malware, 15 percent involve ransomware and 10 percent involve email.
3. Malicious access to credentials led to just under 50 percent of breaches, phishing in a bit under 20 percent and vulnerability exploits about 10 percent.
4. Data breaches are mainly caused by external threat actors, but internal threat actors are still a significant risk, too. About 80 percent of threat actors are external to the targeted organization, and 20 percent are internal—an organization’s own employees, contractors and other insiders.
5. Even though internal threat actors conduct fewer attacks, internal attacks expose the most records and therefore lead to more destructive data breaches. External threat actor breaches expose a median of 30,000 records, internal threat actor breaches expose a median of 375,000 records, and threat actors with a partnership relationship (often in the supply chain) expose a median of 187,500 records.

Whenever organizations are testing to see how vulnerable they are to a data breach, it’s important to simulate internal, external and supply chain attacks. Web application pentesting is also more important than ever. As DBIR makes clear, it’s critical that every organization test for unauthorized credential exploitation and phishing attacks, too.

Thank you Verizon for helping our industry better understand data breach threats! For more information about how Synack can help organizations prevent data breaches, get in touch here.

The post Five Big Takeaways from Verizon’s 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report appeared first on Synack.