Interesting. Maybe this is how one should handle a breach. On the other hand, Wal-Mart never states that the data was limited to Illinois. How big was this?

http://www.databreaches.net/?p=3156

Wal-Mart employee data compromised; 48,000 affected

April 20, 2009 by admin
Filed under: Business Sector, Insider, Theft, U.S.

Well, I haven’t found anything more on this from any news source and it’s always odd to find out about a U.S. breach from a non-U.S. source, but International Supermarkets is reporting that:

It has come to light that Wal-Mart has suffered a breach in its staff data system due to a former employee leaving their job with confidential records. The information is said to refer to 48,000 members of staff in the state of Illinois, America.

Anyone have a notification or more on this? If so, please send it in. Their report says that the breach was mid-2007 but is only being reported in the media now.

Update: Aha! I see that over this past weekend, the good folks over at OSF uploaded the notification to Illinois (pdf) even though there are no media reports linked. Yet another reason to have reports to states publicly available. According to the notification, 48,686 residents of Illinois were affected.

Perhaps we let them take false information? Nah, too Machiavellian. But then I find it difficult to believe the military had lousy security over classified information.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/21/1257202&from=rss

Computer Spies Breach $300-bil Fighter-Jet Project

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday April 21, @09:25AM from the we're-still-number-one-at-this dept. Security The Military United States

suraj.sun writes

"Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department's costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks. Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force's air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft"

Looks like the government is setting up protections for when (not if) security fails.

http://www.databreaches.net/?p=3167

HHS offers health IT privacy guidelines

April 21, 2009 by admin Filed under: Breach Laws, Federal, Healthcare Sector, Legislation, U.S.

Brian Robinson reports in Government Health IT:

The Health and Human Services Department has begun overhauling the privacy and security rules that govern personal health information, which is considered vital to attempts by Congress and the Obama administration to broaden the adoption of electronic health records.

HHS published guidance on April 17 that outlines the ways that health information can be protected from security breaches. It builds on rules in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Read more (external site).

[From the Government Health article:

The latest guidance also provides legal safeguards for those who adhere to it. Although covered entities and businesses are not required to follow it, the technologies and methodologies it describes “create the functional equivalent of a safe harbor,” HHS said. Therefore, those who use them will not have to provide the kinds of notifications the HITECH Act requires in the event of a security breach.

No surprise? There must be money it malware... (Good overview video)

http://www.atthebreach.com/blog/record-breaking-malware-growth/

April 20, 2009

Record Breaking Malware Growth

According to the latest report by F-Secure, malware has had explosive growth during the last half of 2008 with trends continuing into 2009.

The report sites that 2007 doubled over the previous 2006 records, and 2008 more than tripled the 2007 numbers in total malware instances found. The database with signature based definitions is now over 1.5 million with 1 million of those added in 2008.

There's money in “feel good” too. But you have to actually take it.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/susan-boyle-nev.html

Susan Boyle YouTube Video: 100 Million Hits, So Where's the Money? [Updated]

By Eliot Van Buskirk April 20, 2009 1:46:50 PM

Susan Boyle's Britain's Got Talent video is on track to become the most popular video in the history of YouTube, amassing nearly 100 million views in its first nine days and earning the producers of the program a serendipitous, potential windfall that should already be in the millions.

Update, 6:58pm EST: Hours later, a Google spokeswoman responded to our e-mail and phone queries with some surprising news: "That video is not being monetized." have a call in to Sony/BMG to try to determine why the $500,000 or more Boyle's video should have generated so far is apparently being left on the table, despite the fact that Sony/BMG is a confirmed, revenue-sharing partner of YouTube (as is Fremantle, the Sony/BMG division that produces the show).

… As a contestant, Boyle would likely not have a piece of the action — yet. And it isn't clear what deal Cowell, a judge and producer of the show, and his label, Sony/BMG have with YouTube as part of their revenue-sharing deal. If it's half a cent per play — a typical figure for such deals — that would translate into a $500,000 payday so far. And if Google sold a decent amount of video overlays on the video (earning an estimated $20 per thousand views), Cowell and company would be owed millions more in revenue sharing. [Again, Google says it somehow didn't sell a single ad against these 100 million or so views; see update above.]

If a law falls in the forest and no one notices, does it make a noise?

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/scholars-reject.html

Scholars Reject Obama's Stance on Warrantless Cell-Phone Records

By David Kravets April 20, 2009 4:02:57 PM

Two legal scholars say the Obama administration is wrong to claim the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures does not apply to customer cell-site location information that mobile phone carriers retain.

"Because CSLI acquisition is hidden, indiscriminate and intrusive, and because it reveals information over a period of time, it should be subject to the highest level of Fourth Amendment oversight (the same procedures used for wiretapping and video surveillance)," the scholars wrote late Friday.

The scholars are Susan Freiwald, of the USF School of Law, and Peter Swire, of Ohio State University.

Shouldn't all organizations have rules for employees representing the company?

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/20/2330230&from=rss

Telstra Lays Down Law On Social Media

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday April 20, @11:20PM from the doing-more-harm-than-good dept.

Kerrieanne writes to tell us that Australian telecommunications giant Telstra has become the first major player down under to lay down the law with respect to social media. Still recovering from the shakeup surrounding a Telstra worker using the name of the communications minister on Twitter, they have released a six-page set of guidelines on the use of Facebook, Twitter, and other similar websites for both company and personal use.

"Under the guidelines, which are backed up with the threat of disciplinary action, employees using sites on official Telstra business should disclose who they are, ensure they do not give away confidential information and treat other users with respect. They are required to complete an accreditation process and undergo training to update their 'knowledge on emerging social trends and evolving best practice in social media.'"

[So I went to a Telstra Blog site: http://www.nowwearetalking.com.au/opinion/blog-how-the-3rs-empower-telstra-staff-online-225

Download a copy of Telstra's 3Rs guardrails (PDF 67KB)

This could be a very useful research tool...

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/021161.html

April 20, 2009

Google Announces News Timeline

Google News Blog: "Today, we're announcing Google News Timeline--a new feature on Google Labs that organizes many different types of search results on a zoomable, graphical timeline. Google News Timeline presents search results from a wide range of sources. You can search and browse results from Google News, including headlines, quotes, photos from our Hosted News partners, and YouTube partner videos. You can also search for thousands of archival newspapers and magazines from Google News Archive Search and Google Book Search."

For historians?

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/021083.html

April 20, 20090

The World Digital Library Has Launched

"The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research."

Now this is something I've got to play with.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-convert-programs-to-run-on-a-u3-drive-with-packagefactory/

How To Convert Any Windows Program to Run on a U3 Drive

Apr. 20th, 2009 By Guy McDowell

… Eure.ca has developed software called PackageFactory that takes your desktop application and converts it into a U3P application to run on your U3 drive. Best of all, it’s free for personal use!