This will disappoint my Computer Security
students.
After
computer hack, L.A. hospital pays $17,000 in bitcoin ransom to get
back medical records
… While the shift Obama and many others pushed
may
have improved care, electronic medical records led to quite the
unique hostage situation in Los Angeles this week. There, a hospital
fell prey to a cyberattack — and the hospital has escaped its
plight by paying hackers a $17,000 ransom.
… “On the evening of February 5th, our staff
noticed issues accessing the hospital’s computer network,” he
wrote. “Our IT department began an immediate investigation and
determined we had been subject to a malware attack. The malware
locked access to certain computer systems and prevented us from
sharing communications electronically.”
What communications needed to be electronically
shared? As Stefanek got around to pointing out a few paragraphs
later, medical records.
… Could anonymous computer wizards potentially
compromise care and get away with it?
Yes.
“The quickest and most efficient way to restore
our systems and administrative functions was to pay the ransom and
obtain the decryption key,” Stefanek’s
statement said. “In the best interest of restoring normal
operations, we did this.”
… But Hollywood Presbyterian, owned by CHA
Medical Center of South Korea, said not to worry.
“Patient care has not been compromised in any
way,” Stefanek
wrote. “Further, we have no evidence at this time that any
patient or employee information was subject to unauthorized access.”
Local. I seem to remember asking these folks why
they wanted to reinvent the wheel. They had no answer.
Elizabeth Harrington reports:
The Obamacare health exchange in Colorado faced “numerous weaknesses” and had “inadequate security settings,” leaving the personal information of enrollees vulnerable, according to a new audit.
The inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services publicly released its review of Connect for Health Colorado on Wednesday, revealing the exchange had inadequate security measures in place for more than a year.
Read more on Free
Beacon.
[From
the article:
The report,
which reviewed information security controls as of November 2014, did
not go into specifics of Connect for Health Colorado’s
vulnerabilities because of the “sensitive nature of the
information.”
… The Colorado health exchange cost taxpayers
more than $184 million to create, the audit said.
The audit marks the latest bad news for Obamacare
in Colorado, after the state’s biggest co-op announced
it was folding last year. Colorado HealthOP collapsed in
October, leaving 83,000 Coloradans without health insurance.
Also for my Computer Security students. BYOD
could be B-A-D.
How to
prevent shadow IT
What do complex IT policies, outdated software and
lack of IT-supported services have in common? They all contribute to
shadow IT, which occurs
when employees circumvent procedures to use unapproved services and
software. The last thing employees want to do when
working on a project is check in with the IT department, so how can
IT provide employees with necessary resources so shadow IT is no
longer an issue? These InfoSec professionals share their suggestions
for preventing shadow IT before
it becomes the new normal.
I guess I'll guess. (Do I sound like a
politician?)
Max Metzger reports:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) new cyber-risk report has not been shy in claiming legislators are ‘pushing research underground’.
The report, which HPE releases every year, coalesces all the company’s security research into one hefty, 100-page document. Among its conclusions this year were that governments are impinging upon the tech industry’s ability to develop, as well as squashing privacy rights in the wake of mounting international security threats.
Read more on SC
Magazine.
[Get the
HP report here:
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/cyber-risk-report-security-vulnerability/
I'm glad someone took the time to put this
together.
Everything
you need to know about the Apple versus FBI case
(Related) Support via an “amicus tweet?”
Google CEO
Sundar Pichai backs Tim Cook over Apple-FBI controversy
(Related) Another part of the Big Brother
strategy.
At last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee
hearing
on Worldwide Threats, FBI Director James Comey reiterated his
call for a major expansion of the FBI’s surveillance authorities,
but disingenuously downplayed it as fixing a “typo” in the law.
In fact, Comey’s proposed fix, which he calls one of the FBI’s
top legislative priorities, would be a major expansion of
surveillance authority, and a major hit to Americans’ privacy and
civil liberties. It would grant the FBI access to a range of
revealing
and personal details about Americans’ online communications —
what are called Electronic Communications Transactional Records
(ECTR), in legalese — without court approval.
Harm gets easier?
Ross Todd reports:
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh’s first major ruling in data-breach lawsuits against major health insurer Anthem Inc. didn’t do much to clarify how the litigation itself will ultimately play out.
[…]
In her decision, Koh addressed for the first time the question of whether the loss of personal information constitutes harm under New York’s General Business Law, a consumer protection law similar to California’s Unfair Competition Law. It does, she ruled, rejecting arguments from Anthem and its lawyers at Hogan Lovells and expanding reasoning she has applied in at least one earlier data-breach case.
[…]
Koh’s ruling in In Re Anthem Data Breach Litigation builds on the Adobe decision. Like in Adobe, Koh recognized that the theft of personal identification information is a harm to consumers in itself separate from any subsequent misuse of it.
Read more on The
Recorder.
You either love Al Gore or you teach both side of
the argument?
Coverage of
"Climate Confusion Among U.S. Teachers"
"Climate
Confusion Among U.S. Teachers" (PDF), a paper in the journal
Science describing the first nationwide survey of climate
change education in the United States, conceived and funded by NCSE
and conducted in collaboration with researchers at Pennsylvania State
University, received extensive coverage in the press.
[From
the PDF:
Content knowledge is not the only area in need of attention.
Rejection of sound scientific conclusions is often rooted in value
commitments rather than ignorance (16),
and science teachers are not immune from this tendency. A
question measuring political ideology was a more powerful predictor
of teachers' classroom approach than any measure of education or
content knowledge, with those leaning toward “It's not
the government's business to protect people from themselves” most
willing to teach “both sides” (table S8).
Perspective. Jack of all trades, master of none?
Amazon and
Google Want to Take Over Your World
… Amazon is reportedly ramping up hiring for
its own private clothing line, according to Women’s
Wear Daily. The e-commerce king has flirted with the idea
of launching its own label in the past, but the hiring binge WWD
says is underway seems to suggest that it is turning from a dream to
a reality.
… On Wednesday, Google Express said it is
expanding into fresh grocery deliveries, bringing produce, eggs,
meat, and other perishables to parts of San Francisco and Los
Angeles.
… Google is entering an already-crowded space,
where it faces competition from the likes of Instacart, Fresh Direct,
Peapod, and Amazon, none of which make much profit in the notoriously
tight grocery game. Like Instacart and Fresh Direct, Google is
partnering with existing stores, including Costco and Whole Foods,
giving them quick access to supply without the headaches Amazon faces
owning its own inventory at risk of food spoil. But Instacart and
Fresh Direct face their own limitations in terms of scale, a problem
Amazon and Google, with their big data and billions of users, hope to
avoid.
For my gamers.
Amazon
launches free engine for video-game makers
Amazon Web Services is launching a free video-game
engine to enable studios to make sophisticated games and connect them
to the cloud.
Bad enough we no longer teach cursive, now we
don't need writing in any form!
Too Lazy To
Type? Twitter Now Lets iOS And Android Users Capture And Share Videos
In Direct Messages
Typing out sentences to express your sentiments
can be a tad taxing for the lazy you? Do you wish there was a
simpler way of getting your message across on Twitter instead of
typing within the character limit?
You're in luck! Twitter has now been updated to
bring in a new feature that will enable users to capture and share
video messages in Direct Messages.
Tools for the swamped?
Unroll.Me
When was the last time you opened that newsletter?
What about the rest of the subscriptions flooding your inbox? Yea,
that’s what we thought. With Unroll.Me
you can take back your inbox by unsubscribing from unwanted
subscription emails, hassle free. Just one click and they’re gone.
Try it out, you wont regret it.
Perspective?
5
Incredible Tech Lawsuits That Shaped the Digital World
This reminds me to demo Google translate in my
classes.
Google
Translate Now Includes 103 Languages
… The most recent update adds support for
Amharic (the second most widely spoken Semitic language after
Arabic), Corsican (used on the French island of Corsica and
Napoleon's first language), Frisian (the native language of more than
half of Netherlands' Friesland province), Kyrgyz (used in
Kyrgyzstan), Hawaiian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Luxembourgish, Samoan
(which uses only 14 letters), Scots Gaelic, Shona, Sindhi, Pashto and
Xhosa.
Perspective (and amusement) No doubt a Republican
version will follow.
The Perfect
Democratic Stump Speech
Let's make an App for that!
Take Any of
These 5 Courses and Make Your First Android App
Interesting. A smartphone for $3.74? This is
creating a stir. Perhaps I should sic my students on the story…
Freedom
251: We answer your top 10 questions
The cheapest smartphone in the world -- the
Freedom 251 -- costs just Rs. 251 and is apparently made by a
Noida-based company called Ringing Bells. It was launched yesterday
to more questions than answers.
… We have a letter from the Indian Cellular
Association (ICA) written to telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad
that estimates that this phone should cost at least USD 60
(approximnately Rs. 4,100).
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