Wednesday, January 06, 2010

The numbers always grow – although rarely by a factor of 6...

http://www.databreaches.net/?p=9312

(NARA update) More potential victims of identity theft notified of hard-drive loss

January 5, 2010 by admin Filed under Breach Incidents, Government Sector, Lost or Missing, U.S.

Elise Castelli reports:

The National Archives and Records Administration last month warned 150,000 more people who interacted with the Clinton administration that their personal information may be at risk after a hard drive was lost.

The December letters were the second batch sent in connection with the March data loss. Previously, NARA mailed more than 26,000 letters to potential identity theft victims, according to the agency’s Jan. 4 statement. Data on the drive included the names and Social Security numbers of White House employees, job applicants and White House visitors.

In the letters, NARA offers affected individuals one year of free credit monitoring, identify theft insurance and fraud resolution assistance through the credit monitoring firm Experian.

Read more on FederalTimes.com



This may be the hack of 2010. All you need do is scan for default or simple passwords to initiate the transfers, and someone on the other end to withdraw the money before the victim catches on.

http://www.databreaches.net/?p=9308

Hacker steals $3M from Duanesburg schools

January 5, 2010 by admin Filed under Education Sector

Paul Nelson reports:

A computer hacker stole $3 million from the Duanesburg Central School District last month and transferred the money to overseas banks, school officials said today.

The thefts occurred between Dec. 18 and Dec. 21. The district’s bank, NBT Bank, noticed the questionable money transfers on Dec. 22 and alerted the district, Superintendent Christine Crowley said.

The FBI is investigating the theft.

So far, the district has been able to recover $2.5 million of the money. Crowley said the school is confident it will recover the rest of the money.

Crowley said no one with the district or its bank are considered suspects.

Read more on TimesUnion.com.



Interesting to non-lawyer-me. If this data was the result of a hack, it is necessary to review it (how else do you know who to notify) But can it be used as evidence without verification?

http://www.databreaches.net/?p=9322

Hackers May Have Unearthed Dirt on Stanford

January 6, 2010 by admin Filed under Breach Incidents, Financial Sector, Hack, Of Note

Brian Krebs writes:

In early 2008, while federal investigators were busy investigating disgraced financier Robert Allen Stanford for his part in an alleged $8 billion fraudulent investment scheme, Eastern European hackers were quietly hoovering up tens of thousands customer financial records from the Bank of Antigua, an institution formerly owned by the Stanford Group.

[...]

Once inside of Stanford’s network, the unidentified hackers appear to have swiped the credentials from an internal network administrator, and soon had downloaded the user names and password hashes for more than 1,000 employees of Stanford Financial, Stanford Group, Stanford Trust, and Stanford International Bank Ltd.

Among the purloined files is a listing of what appear to be ownership and balance information for tens of thousands of customer accounts at Bank of Antigua. Each listing includes the account number, owner’s name, address, balance, and accrued interest.

Read more on KrebsonSecurity.com

[From the Krebs site:

On the condition of anonymity, the investigator shared with this author files recovered from the breach, which were stored in plain text for at least several weeks on a Web site controlled by the attackers. This source said he forwarded the same information on to the FBI shortly after discovering it in early 2008.



I never said dates couldn't be a problem. What I said was, “Testing for date problems so easy even a caveman could do it.”

http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/01/06/0343252/Y201K?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

Y2.01K

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday January 06, @01:54AM from the wait-till-two-oh-thirty-eight dept.

After our recent discussion of decimal/hexadecimal confusion at the turn of 2010, alphadogg writes in with a Network World survey of wider problems caused by the date change.

"A decade after the Y2K crisis, date changes still pose technology problems, making some security software upgrades difficult and locking millions of bank ATM users out of their accounts. Chips used in bank cards to identify account numbers could not read the year 2010 properly, making it impossible for ATMs and point of sale machines in Germany to read debit cards of 30 million people since New Year's Day, according to published reports. The workaround is to reprogram the machines so the chips don't have to deal with the number. In Australia, point-of-sales machines skipped ahead to 2016 rather than 2010 at midnight Dec. 31, rendering them unusable by retailers, some of whom reported thousands of dollars in lost sales. Meanwhile Symantec's network-access control software that is supposed to check whether spam and virus definitions have been updated recently enough fails because of this 2010 problem."



You know you have arrived in the digital age when lawyers are instructed to build digital reference books...

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/023182.html

January 05, 2010

Establishing Guidance for Prosecutors Regarding Criminal Discovery

Issuance of Guidance and Summary of Actions Taken in Response to the Report of the Department of Justice Criminal Discovery and Case Management Working Group, David W. Ogden, Deputy Attorney General, January 4, 2010

  • "By making deliberate choices regarding discovery issues, prosecutors are most likely to comply with discovery obligations imposed by law and Department policy and assure that the goals of a prosecution are met. By separate memorandum to the United States Attorneys and to the heads of components that prosecute criminal cases, I am directing that each USAO and component develop a discovery policy that establishes discovery practice within the district or component. This directive will assure that USAOs and components have developed a discovery strategy that is consistent with the guidance and takes into account controlling precedent, existing local practices, and judicial expectations."

From the article:

Create an online directory of resources pertaining to discovery issues that will be available to all prosecutors at their desktop



I would never say that the Democrats are concerned that Health Care costs are not rising as fast as they used to. I would never say that is why they want to pass a law requiring every American to buy more Health Care. Not me. I would never say that.

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/023178.html

January 05, 2010

CMS Issues Annual Report on National Health Spending

Health Spending Growth At A Historic Low In 2008: "In 2008, U.S. health care spending growth slowed to 4.4 percent—the slowest rate of growth over the past forty-eight years. The deceleration was broadly based for nearly all payers and health care goods and services, as growth in both price and nonprice factors slowed amid the recession. Despite the slowdown, national health spending reached $2.3 trillion, or $7,681 per person, and the health care portion of gross domestic product (GDP) grew from 15.9 percent in 2007 to 16.2 percent in 2008. These developments reflect the general pattern that larger increases in the health spending share of GDP generally occur during or just after periods of economic recession. Despite the overall slowdown in national health spending growth, increases in this spending continue to outpace growth in the resources available to pay for it.."

  • National Health Expenditure Data - "The National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA) are the official estimates of total health care spending in the United States. Dating back to 1960, the NHEA measures annual U.S. expenditures for health care goods and services, public health activities, program administration, the net cost of private insurance, and research and other investment related to health care. The data are presented by type of service, sources of funding, and by sponsors."



Competitive vacuum # 906 (and you thought it was dangerous to be texting while driving.

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/01/05/2032259/Bringing-Free-Television-To-Phones-In-America?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

Bringing Free Television To Phones In America

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 05, @04:11PM from the all-upside dept.

ideonexus writes

"South Korea, China, Brazil, parts of Europe, and Japan have been watching television on their phones for free since 2005, but American mobile carriers are struggling to offer clunky streaming video using Qualcomm's proprietary MediaFLO system for an additional monthly fee and excessive bandwidth demands. Now, with America having gone digital in June, if Mobile carriers were to have ATSC M/H (advanced television systems committee — mobile/handheld) television-tuner chips built into their handsets it sounds like we could enjoy free TV on our cell phones too; however, these companies have already invested a great deal of money adapting their networks to Qualcomm's format and Qualcomm is considering becoming a mobile television distributor itself."



For my website class

http://www.w3.org/2005/03/slideshow.html#%281%29

HTML Slidy: Slide Shows in XHTML



Yo! Yo! Yo! Check it out bro! After you get your Mozart tatoo, here's where you can grab some tunes!

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-3-best-classical-music-download-sites/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Makeuseof+%28MakeUseOf.com%29

The 3 Best Free Classical Music Download Sites

By Tina on Jan. 5th, 2010

Classical.com

Classical.com is the classical pendant to iTunes. It contains over 450,000 tracks from 3,290 composers, which can be downloaded in exchange for a small fee.

Every week, however, an entire album is available to download for free.

Wikipedia:Sound/list

This Wikipedia site is a huge repository of free classical music.

Classic Cat

Classic Cat is the Google of classical music. The index of this classical catalog comprises over 5000 free to download pieces.

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