The
breach du jour.
Reuters
reports:
U.S. hospital operator Community Health Systems Inc said it suspected
personal data, including patient names and addresses, of about 4.5
million people were stolen
by Chinese hackers from its computer network during April
and June.
The company said the data, considered protected under the Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, included patient names,
addresses, birth dates, telephone numbers and Social Security
numbers. It did not include patient credit card or medical
information, Community Health Systems said in a regulatory filing.
Read
more on Fox
Business.
If
this is news to you, well, it’s also news to me, as I don’t
recall seeing any press release from CHS, and can find no substitute
notice on their web site.
In
their SEC Form 8-K filing of August 8, they report:
In July 2014, Community Health Systems, Inc. (the “Company”)
confirmed that its computer network was the target of an external,
criminal cyber attack that the Company believes occurred in April and
June, 2014.
Just
another way the VA fails veterans. Small breaches, but lots of them.
One
of the incidents the Veterans Administration reported to Congress for
July affected thousands of veterans seen in South Carolina. The VA
reports that an employee noticed on July 14 that four boxes that were
being prepared for shipment to the Records Center and Vault located
in Neosho, Missouri, were missing. According to the employee, the
boxes were kept behind keypad locked doors; however some of the boxes
were moved into the morgue hallway from the locked room without her
knowledge. A search for the missing boxes did not uncover them.
Each
sheet of paper in the boxes is on a separate veteran. There were a
total of 3,637 veterans involved.
(Related)
The
South
Carolina VA incident wasn’t the only large incident the
Veterans Administration reported to Congress for
July. In a separate incident, a folder containing multiple patients’
information including full names, SSN’s, and other medical
information was found in a ladies restroom in the main lobby of the
medical center in Albuquerque, New Mexico on July 30.
The
Internet can handle IoT, businesses need to plan ahead.
Internet
of Things Is Overwhelming IT Networks
By
2020, the Internet of things (IoT) is expected to interconnect 26
billion computing devices in businesses, homes, cars, clothes,
animals and pretty much everything else, according to Gartner.
That's a thirtyfold increase over the past five years. While the
potential for innovation is exciting, it's taking a toll on IT
resources, according to survey research from Infoblox. Many tech
professionals surveyed said that any
required deployments for the IoT will become part of their existing
IT network, even though most said their network is already
at capacity. It doesn't help, findings reveal, that the
business side often does not keep the IT organization informed about
their IoT-related projects.
(Related)
Watch the video!
How
to hack and crack the connected home
…
The BBC's experiment brought together seven computer security
experts who have been looking into so-called smart gadgets to find
out how many they could subvert.
And
how many could they crack the security on?
All
of them.
(Related)
More on corporate IT failing to keep up.
Four-Year
Old Flaw Exploited by Stuxnet Still Targeted
It
was 2010 when the Stuxnet malware first appeared in the public
consciousness.
Though
the years have passed however, there is no shortage of machines still
vulnerable to attacks on one of the vulnerabilities the malware
exploited as it trotted across the globe.
According
to a paper
released by Kaspersky Lab, CVE-2010-2568 remains a widely exploited
security hole. Despite the age of the vulnerability, Kaspersky Lab
detected tens of millions of exploits targeting the bug between
November 2013 and June 2014, though not all may correlate to
individual attacks due to the way the bug is exploited.
For
my Ethical Hackers.
Andy
Greenberg reports:
In the age of surveillance paranoia, most smartphone users know
better than to give a random app or website permission to use their
device’s microphone. But researchers have found there’s another,
little-considered sensor in modern phones that can also listen in on
their conversations. And it doesn’t even need to ask.
In a presentation at the Usenix security conference next week,
researchers from Stanford University and Israel’s defense research
group Rafael plan to present a technique for using a smartphone to
surreptitiously eavesdrop on conversations in a room—not with a
gadget’s microphone, but with its gyroscopes, the sensors designed
measure the phone’s orientation.
Read
more on Wired.
If
Google can photograph my backyard from space, why would a drone
flying at 200 feet not be able to snap a few?
John
Wesley Hall writes:
Joel Celso, Comment: Droning on about the Fourth Amendment: Adopting
a Reasonable Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence to Prevent Unreasonable
Searches by Unmanned Aircraft Systems, 43 U. Balt. L. Rev. 461
(2014).
Read
the intro to the article on FourthAmendment.com
This
should be a real mess.
Court
ruling: Employers must reimburse some BYOD costs
In
what could be a decisive blow to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
mega trend, the California Court of Appeal ruled late last week that
companies must reimburse
employees for work-related use of personal cellphones, as
described
in the National Law Review.
Specifically,
the Court of Appeal in Cochran
v. Schwan's Home Service stated:
"We hold that when employees must use their personal cellphones
for work-related calls, Labor Code section 2802 requires the employer
to reimburse them. Whether the employees have cellphone plans with
unlimited minutes or limited minutes, the reimbursement owed is a
reasonable percentage of their cellphone bills."
Perhaps
we should listen to Sir Tim?
A
Magna Carta for the web
Sir
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web 25 years ago. So it’s
worth a listen when he warns us: There’s a battle ahead. Eroding
net neutrality, filter bubbles and centralizing corporate control all
threaten the web’s wide-open spaces. It’s up to users to fight
for the right to access and openness. The question is, What kind of
Internet do we want?
Another
Firefox extension for my researching students?
–
Wikipedia is the greatest curator of human knowledge, allowing people
all around the world to freely access over 30 million articles. The
only problem? Wikipedia was built 13 years ago – and hasn’t
changed much since then. WikiWand is a modern interface that
optimizes Wikipedia’s amazing content for a quicker and
significantly improved reading experience.
Something
I hope my researching students can learn on their own.
Activities
for Teaching Students How to Research With Google Books
Google
Books can be a good research tool for students if they are aware
of it and know how to use it. These are the activities that I often
use to teach students and others about the features of Google Books.
1. Search for a book by using the "researching a topic?"
search box.
2. Use the advanced search menu to refine your search to "full view only" books.
3. Use the advanced search menu to refine a search by date, author, or publisher.
4. Search within a book for a name or phrase.
5. Download a free ebook.
6. Share an ebook via the link provided or by embedding it into a blog post.
7. Create a bookshelf in your Google Books account and add some books to it.
8. Share your bookshelf with someone else.
2. Use the advanced search menu to refine your search to "full view only" books.
3. Use the advanced search menu to refine a search by date, author, or publisher.
4. Search within a book for a name or phrase.
5. Download a free ebook.
6. Share an ebook via the link provided or by embedding it into a blog post.
7. Create a bookshelf in your Google Books account and add some books to it.
8. Share your bookshelf with someone else.
The
following video and slides provide directions on using Google Books.
For
the student Gaming Club.
Should
You Put World of Warcraft on Your Resume?
…
Just as the Moneyball
sensibility transformed professional sports worldwide, the ability to
perform well in fantasy
sports leagues signals that somebody has a decent grasp of
probabilities, risks, and opportunities in a competitively
transparent and transparently competitive environment. That’s a
capability that deserves discussion even if it’s not directly on
enterprise point.
(Related)
Because Gaming can't be all serious resume-bilding stuff.
Mini
Metro: A Challenging Subway System Mind Teaser
…
Mini Metro is a very simple yet challenging strategy game that can
be played on Windows, Mac OS X, and even Linux. After a relatively
quick download, you can adjust a few settings (primarily graphics
quality and screen resolution), and you’ll be thrown into the game
in no time. There’s actually very little explanation, but it’s
easy to pick up. If you’re having difficulties, don’t worry —
I’ll lay it out step by step anyways.
(Related)
and just one more.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/google-coming-children-facebook-starts-tagging-satire-tech-news-digest/
Flappy
Bird Creator Reveals Swing Copters
And
finally, Dong Nguyen is back with a new game. Who’s he? Only the
guy responsible for Flappy Bird, the free mobile game which took
the world by storm before Dong pulled it from app stores. Flappy
Bird was frustratingly difficult to beat, and Dong has sought to
punish us all once again.
His
new game is Swing
Copters, and it’s essentially Flappy Bird by another name.
Apart from the main character, the addition of swinging hammers, and
the fact you play vertically rather than horizontally, this is the
same game in a different outfit. It’s a
free download though, so we really shouldn’t complain.
Dilbert
explains contract law?
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