http://www.databreaches.net/?p=9415
Health care: A ‘goldmine’ for fraudsters
January 13, 2010 by admin
Filed under Commentaries and Analyses, Healthcare Sector, Of Note, U.S.
Parija Kavilanz reports:
There’s a group of people who really love the U.S. health care system — the fraudsters, scammers and organized criminal gangs who are bilking the system of as much as $100 billion a year.
Health care identity theft dominated all other crimes in the sector last year, according to Louis Saccoccio, executive director of the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association (NHCAA), an advocacy group whose members include insurers, law enforcement and regulatory agencies.
The most common method of health care identity fraud occurs when someone with legitimate access, such as a hospital administrator or a doctor’s assistant, sells patients’ information to organized criminal groups.
Increasingly, criminal groups are hacking into digital medical records so that they can steal money from the $450 billion, 44-million-beneficiary Medicare system — making the government, by far, the “single biggest victim” of health care fraud, according to Rob Montemorra, chief of the FBI’s Health Care Fraud Unit.
Read more on CNN.
Is this an attack sponsored by China (exercising their army's Hacking Division) or “merely” some very sophisticated hackers who happen to use Chinese websites?
Google Hackers Targeted Source Code of More Than 30 Companies
By Kim Zetter January 13, 2010 2:28 am
A hack attack that targeted Google in December also hit 33 other companies, including financial institutions and defense contractors, and was aimed at stealing source code [What source code would be shared by 33 different companies? Bob] from the companies, say security researchers at iDefense.
The hackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader to deliver malware to the companies and were in many cases successful at siphoning the source code they sought, according to a statement distributed Tuesday by iDefense, a division of VeriSign. The attack was similar to an attack that targeted other companies last July, the company said.
… Adobe acknowledged on Tuesday in a blog post that it discovered Jan. 2 that it had been the target of a “sophisticated, coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies.”
The company didn’t say whether it was a victim of the same attack that struck Google. But Adobe’s announcement came just minutes after Google revealed that it had been the victim of a “highly sophisticated” hack attack originating in China in December.
Neither Google nor Adobe provided details about how the hacks occurred. Google said only that the hackers were able to steal unspecified intellectual property from it and had focused their attack on obtaining access to the Gmail accounts of human rights activists who were involved in China rights issues. [Sounds more government than criminal. Bob]
(Related) Is this the corporate equivalent of war? Google shut off the AP in December (see yesterday's Blog) so perhaps they are just tired of dealing with all the posturing.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/023242.html
January 12, 2010
Google Announces "A new approach to China"
"In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different... We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China." These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."
(Related) Or perhaps just coincidence?
Twitter Hackers Take Down Baidu
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 12, @04:51PM from the thought-they-were-friends dept.
snydeq writes
"The group that took down Twitter last month has apparently claimed another victim: China's largest search engine Baidu.com. Offline late Monday, Baidu.com at one point displayed an image saying 'This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army,' according to a report in the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party and other Web sites. The Iranian Cyber Army first gained notoriety with its Dec. 18 Twitter attack. Baidu's domain name records were the focus of the hack. On Monday, the company was using domain name servers belonging to HostGator, a Florida ISP, instead of the Baidu.com nameservers the company normally uses."
Towards ubiquitous surveillance (If Mom can do this, what can Big Brother do?)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-10433539-238.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
CES: Is Taser's phone-monitoring product overparenting?
by Larry Magid January 12, 2010 4:27 PM PST
Taser International, the company that makes Taser guns to help law enforcement subdue unruly suspects, now has a product aimed at children. At CES, the company announced the Protector Family Safety Program--a series of products designed to help parents monitor and control what their kids are doing with their phones.
Lets parents listen in
Protector goes further than most parental control products in that it doesn't just provide a summary of activity--such as the incoming and outgoing numbers of people the kids call or text--but allows parents to listen to actual calls and read text messages. [...and if the little darlings say something completely unacceptable, like: “Let's join the Young Republicans,” Mom or Dad can hit them with 50,000 volts! Bob]
Facts? Opinions? At least they asked the consumers.
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=6931
Consumer protection agencies need privacy definitions (commentary)
January 12, 2010 by Dissent Filed under Businesses, Internet, Legislation
Ari Schwartz of CDT writes:
Internet privacy continues to be a major concern among Americans. In a recent study, the Annenberg School found that 69 percent of American adults feel there should be a law that gives people the right to know everything that a website knows about them; 92 percent of those surveyed believe there should be a law that requires “websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about an individual,” if requested to do so; and 35 percent of the respondents believe that officials of companies that break these laws should serve jail time. These strong responses suggest that there is pent-up anger about the lack of transparency, control and respect for the use of personal information.
Therefore, it is surprising that in his recent op-ed on The Hill website (“Protecting consumer privacy online,” Jan. 11) the president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Randall Rothenberg, would not only continue to suggest that industry is adequately addressing all privacy concerns, but also would cite a report calling for greater law enforcement action in doing so.
Read more on The Hill.
(Related) Semantics or politics (either way, I got the tics...)
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=6920
F.T.C.: Has Internet Gone Beyond Privacy Policies?
January 12, 2010 by Dissent Filed under Govt, Internet
Stephanie Clifford writes:
Two top Federal Trade Commission officials questioned whether the Internet had evolved past privacy policies, at a meeting with editors and reporters of The New York Times today.
The chairman of the F.T.C., Jon Leibowitz, and David Vladeck, chief of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, stopped by for an on-the-record chat about online privacy and the news business, among other topics. Mr. Leibowitz was appointed chairman in 2009 after five years at the commission, while Mr. Vladeck is a relatively new arrival to the F.T.C.
[...]
“Philosophically, we wonder if we’re moving to a post-disclosure era and what that would look like,” Mr. Vladeck said. “What’s the substitute for it?”
He said the commission was still looking into the issue, but it hoped to have an answer by June or July, when it plans to publish a report on the subject.
Read more in The New York Times.
[From the article:
Both have signaled to Internet publishers and advertisers that they expect the commission to take a more active role in safeguarding consumer privacy, a subject they discussed on Monday.
… For example, if a Web site asks people to agree to a transaction and to let their data be sold in one form. “I don’t necessarily think that’s fair,” Mr. Vladeck said. [“Fair” is a codeword. It means “the liberals are coming!” Bob]
For my students. Forward to any Facebookers you know.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-steps-to-regain-control-of-your-facebook-privacy-part-1/
8 Steps To Regain Control Of Your Facebook Privacy
By Mahendra Palsule on Jan. 12th, 2010
In this Part 1, we will cover 8 steps to reset Facebook privacy settings – covering privacy in the context of search visibility, photos and videos, relationships and contact information.
… In the upcoming Part 2 of this guide, we will cover steps you can take to reset Facebook privacy settings in the context of applications, friends, news feed, wall posts, groups, ads, and quitting Facebook. Have questions or other tips to share?
The opposite of blocking?
http://about.digg.com/node/499
Two Major News Outlets Integrate with Digg
by Bob Buch on January 10, 2010 - 12:00am
In your travels across the web, you may have noticed little “Digg This” buttons out there on various publisher or news sites. Some sites also have Digg widgets that display their top stories as ranked by Digg. Two of the most recent publishers to add these types of integrations are CBS News and WSJ.com - who this week added the Digg widget to all their blogs (the ones that do not require a subscription to view).
You can check out the CBS integration here and the WSJ integration here.
“Clearly you don't understand Napoleonic Law, you miserable blogger, you.”
http://torrentfreak.com/french-3-strikes-group-unveils-copyright-infringing-logo-100112/
French 3 Strikes Group Unveils Copyright Infringing Logo
Written by enigmax on January 12, 2010
Hadopi, the French agency charged with handling file-sharers’ copyright digressions, has just made a huge infringement faux pas of its own. Last week the group unveiled the logo which is set to represent this bastion of copyright righteousness, but embarrassingly it was designed with unlicensed fonts.
The supermarket tabloids make money, why can't Wikileaks?
The Economy of Wikileaks
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 12, @09:42PM from the greater-good dept.
StefanBerlin writes
"Wikileaks is fast becoming one of the most politically important platforms on the Web. In this interview Julian Assange, the spokesperson, talks about its current situation and about the financial and economic background of Wikileaks. He also talks about why they cancelled the planned auction of the emails of Hugo Chavez's former speechwriter in Venezuela, and about Wikileaks' plans for a subscription model that could possibly solve the site's financial problems once and for all."
Lazy is good. Note: This won't work for Archival Blogs like mine. 140 characters, remember?
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/twitterlive-net-feeding-your-blog-to-twitter-easily
Twitterlive.net - Feeding Your Blog To Twitter Easily
The aim of this website is a straightforward one: it will let you take your blog’s feed and have the content published to Twitter automatically. As any blogger worth his salt knows, Twitter is where it’s at when it comes to promoting what he does on the blogosphere.
No comments:
Post a Comment