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As Forrest Gump said, "Stupid is as stupid does." The 2009 Verizon Business data breach investigation report confirmed what the 2008 report revealed -- attackers usually gain a foothold through stupid, basic errors. "In virtually all the cases, we found that lots of the things that were simple and straightforward, had they been deployed, would have stopped the attack," said Peter Tippett, vice president of research and intelligence for Verizon Business Security Solutions. "Simple things like changing the password from the word "password" on the system, those basic errors were somewhere, endlessly; they were everywhere." In fact, the 2009 Verizon Business Data Breach Investigations Report showed that 67% of the 90 confirmed data breaches that Verizon investigated last year revealed that kind of error, usually on a third-party system, often tangential to the heart of the enterprise. But they open the door to the good stuff: thousands or even millions of customer records.

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A number of software errors are present in the Global Election Management System (GEMS) voting system (version 1.18.19), put out by the company Premier Election Solutions, Inc. A Deck Zero error led to 179 tallied ballots inadvertently being deleted from initial results in the November 4, 2008 election in California - which was subsequently corrected, according to California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen. As a result, the state may withdraw approval for the use of this system.

Parents of 18,541 Metro Nashville students will receive letters next week outlining a security breach that put their children's Social Security numbers online for three months. Advertisement Boston-based Public Consulting Group Inc., which holds a five-year, $2.6-million-a-year contract with the state to collect student data from various districts, corrected the error March 31 after a parent using Google to search her daughter's name found it - along with personal data for the students and 6,000 parent names. Art Staehling learned Wednesday that his teenage daughter was on the list and said he's concerned what could happen to her identity. "I find it hard to believe that an established company had a problem of this magnitude," Staehling said. The consulting group will pay for parents of affected children to check all family members' credit reports through Experian and for a year of monitoring. One of the group's owners, Stephen Skinner, said the error happened when workers running a test Dec. 28 on random student data inadvertently stored a file to an insecure directory. They discovered the error March 5 and took down the file, which contained student names, gender, race or ethnicity, date of birth, Social Security number and, in some cases, parent names. But they were unaware Google's search engine had already found the file and indexed it. That's how the parent, who is also a Metro schools employee, found out about the breach weeks later. Public Consulting Group worked with Google to take the information down.

"The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reported its annual breach data for 2009 last week, and for the first time malicious attacks were more frequently identified as the source of those breaches than human error. In its "2009 Data Breach Report," the ITRC found 498 publicly disclosed breaches last year, down from 657 the year before. The downturn could have resulted from changes in breach disclosure, rather than a real drop-off in system compromises, the organization says. Interestingly, paper breaches now account for 26 percent of data leaks, up 46 percent compared to 2008. Malicious attacks outnumbered breaches attributed to human error for the first time in the three years the report has been compiled. The business sector accounted for 41 percent of data breaches, up from 21 percent the year before. Approximately 222 million records were compromised, the organization says -- and about 130 million of those came from the single breach at Heartland Payment Systems. Out of 498 breaches, only six reported they had either encryption or other strong security features protecting the exposed data, the ITRC says . "

Expect more action from the FTC on data privacy breeach

Banks and financial firms are placing more emphasis on internal threats to cut the flow of data leakage as a result of employee mistakes or workers disgruntled with layoffs and downsizing during the economic crisis, according to a recent survey. The report, "Protecting What Matters: The Sixth Annual Global Security Survey," is based on a Deloitte survey of 250 CISOs in the financial-services industry. It found that 36% of respondents believe the internal threat represents the greatest risk to organizations, compared to 13% who said external threats are the biggest concern. Mark Steinhoff, head of Deloitte's financial services security and privacy practices, said an organization's biggest mistake would be to let its guard down. While the number of security breaches may have declined over the last year, cybercriminals are not rationing back their efforts. "The number of breaches that are occurring are really at the hands of insiders and organizations are understanding that there is a real threat of malicious attacks and exposure of personal information by insiders," Steinhoff said. The failing economy may be driving the increased concern over insider threats, Steinoff said. "The climate we're in today causes concerns about disgruntled employees," he said. "We are seeing the layoffs and other forms of downsizing. Frankly with limited budget and less than satisfied employees, it really raises the parameter on that threat." Human error is the leading cause of information systems failure, and is likely to be the main cause of security attacks in the near future, according to 86% of those surveyed. To protect against employee mistakes that lead to a breach, financial firms should focus on risk rather than compliance to protect themselves, Steinhoff said. "[Organizations] need to look at what they want to protect and look at various types of threats internally and evaluate who has access to the data and who has access to which system, and approach it from that persp

Last week, President Barack Obama convened a health-care summit in Washington to identify programs that would improve quality and restrain burgeoning costs. He stated that all his policies would be based on rigorous scientific evidence of benefit. The flagship proposal presented by the president at this gathering was the national adoption of electronic medical records -- a computer-based system that would contain every patient's clinical history, laboratory results, and treatments. This, he said, would save some $80 billion a year, safeguard against medical errors, reduce malpractice lawsuits, and greatly facilitate both preventive care and ongoing therapy of the chronically ill. Following his announcement, we spoke with fellow physicians at the Harvard teaching hospitals, where electronic medical records have been in use for years. All of us were dumbfounded, wondering how such dramatic claims of cost-saving and quality improvement could be true. The basis for the president's proposal is a theoretical study published in 2005 by the RAND Corporation, funded by companies including Hewlett-Packard and Xerox that stand to financially benefit from such an electronic system. And, as the RAND policy analysts readily admit in their report, there was no compelling evidence at the time to support their theoretical claims. Moreover, in the four years since the report, considerable data have been obtained that undermine their claims. The RAND study and the Obama proposal it spawned appear to be an elegant exercise in wishful thinking. To be sure, there are real benefits from electronic medical records. Physicians and nurses can readily access all the information on their patients from a single site. Particularly helpful are alerts in the system that warn of potential dangers in the prescribing of a certain drug for a patient on other therapies that could result in toxicity. But do these benefits translate into $80 billion annually in cost-savings? The cost-savings from avoi

Social media is on the rise, and so are the privacy and security risks. Is it time to dial back on the whole Web 2.0 'friend' thing? The social media honeymoon is officially over. While it may not yet be time to fly to Reno for a quickie divorce, you might want to start thinking about sleeping in separate bedrooms for a while. Example du jour: Over the weekend, a rogue application spread across Facebook, warning users about bogus errors in their profiles. Clicking on the "Error Check System" app causes it to send false warnings to your entire FB posse, per the unofficial AllFacebook blog. There doesn't seem to be any payload associated with that app besides driving traffic, but the potential for abuse is obvious. But a bigger problem on social nets is an old familiar one: spam. So far, spam only accounts for about 5 to 25 percent of all e-mail passed on social networks, versus 90 percent of regular e-mail, says Adam O'Donnell, director of emerging tech for Cloudmark, which filters spam for some large social nets (but won't identify which ones). As more people start tweeting about what their cats ate for lunch and share their Facebook profiles with near-total strangers, though, that number will only grow. The type of spam on social networks is different too, says O'Donnell. Think fewer fake Viagra come-ons, more social engineering scams. In other words, the junk you get on social networks is more likely to be aimed at stealing your credentials or your identity -- and thus much more dangerous than garden-variety spam.

In Deloitte's sixth annual Global Security Survey, people are the problem. "[P]eople continue to be an organization's greatest asset as well as its greatest worry," Adel Melek, global leader of security and privacy services at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, said in the report. "That has not changed from 2007. What has changed is the environment. The economic meltdown was not at its peak when respondents took this survey. If there was ever an environment more likely to facilitate an organization's people being distracted, nervous, fearful, or disgruntled, this is it. To state that security vigilance is even more important at a time like this is an understatement." On one level, that couldn't be more obvious: It's not as if anyone worries about squirrels hacking servers; security has always been about people. (Robots, the report says, are unlikely to replace the human workforce during the lifetime of anyone reading the report. Finally, some good employment news.) Yet despite the obviousness of the problem, the obvious solution -- complete denial of access -- doesn't work. People use computers and computers are more useful when connected and it just gets worse from there. That may explain why identity and access management remained top of mind for survey respondents. Deloitte's survey, drawn from major financial companies around the globe, focuses on governance, investment, risk, use of security technologies, quality of operations, and privacy. It includes some good news -- external breaches have declined sharply over the past year -- and troublesome news -- fewer companies say they have the commitment and funding to address regulatory compliance. In terms of risk, specifically information systems failure, people are identified as the most significant vulnerability. "Human error is overwhelmingly stated as the greatest weakness this year (86%), followed by technology (a distant 63%)," the report states. It attributes the rising risk to increased adoption of new techno

"Hackers are using a variety of weapons and exploiting errors such as default passwords and weak or misconfigured access control lists (ACLs), according to the latest Verizon Business Data Breach Investigations Report. The follow-up to April's 2009 Data Breach Investigation Report looks under the hood of the company's probes, analyzing how breaches happen and how to protect sensitive data. "Customers who read the 2009 Data Breach Investigation Report said they wanted to know how these attacks take place, give some examples from our caseloads and see if those circumstances can happen to them," said Wade Baker, Verizon Business research and intelligence principal. "

A year ago, we talked about reaching for Terabit Ethernet, the next power-of-10 increase in speed over the state of the art today. Now, researchers have demonstrated one way to do that. In a paper published in the Feb. 16 edition of Optics Express, the researchers detail their approach for de-multiplexing signals at high speeds, claiming that they were able to achieve 640Gbps over fiber-optic lines with no errors. The material they used in the chip is chalcogenide, and Australian researchers were talking about the high-speed networking possibilities of the material last summer. Calling it "just a piece of scratched glass," they said it could potentially be cheap to produce.

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The US government has now adopted a policy of fostering the adoption of electronic medical records (EMR). The policy is intended to increase the efficiency of the US healthcare system, thereby lowering costs and reducing the incidence of preventable errors. At the same time, through its The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rules, the government has set minimum standards for the security of those records. These two goals-privacy and security of these records, along with their free interchange among medical providers-can easily wind up at odds with each other. A recent study that looked at the role of state privacy laws in EMR adoption suggests that the problem is very real, as state privacy laws seem to inhibit the use of EMR by hospitals located there. The authors, based at MIT and the University of Virginia, line up a variety of data that validate their suggestion that privacy and the use of EMR may require a careful balance. So, for example, they cite some highly publicized lapses when it comes to the maintenance of patient privacy: someone once offered the records of 200,000 patients for sale on Craigslist, while hospitals have seen their own employees attempt to get at the electronic files of famous patients. Perhaps more significantly, the authors suggest that the public, as represented by their legislators, has concerns about the privacy of EMR. They found that states that have passed their own privacy laws to supplement the HIPAA rules tend to have a higher percentage of their populace signed up for the Do Not Call Registry, indicating a corresponding individual-level interest in maintaining privacy. So, they looked at whether these laws had any impact on the adoption of EMR by hospitals located in each state.

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A health care industry coalition on Monday released a prescriptive security framework that organizations can use to safeguard patient records as they increasingly move online. The framework, released by the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) -- which represents health care providers, pharmacies, insurers, biotech firms and medical device manufacturers -- is based on well-known standards such as COBIT, NIST and ISO 270001. But this is the first benchmark developed specifically for protecting health data. "It's tailored to protecting health information right out of the gate," Michael Wilson, vice president and chief information security officer of McKesson, the largest U.S. pharmaceutical distributor, told SCMagazineUS.com on Monday. "It's just a different sort of data. It's still structured [like other verticals], but there's a lot more of it in health care." The framework was created to improve adoption rates with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and increase patient confidence in the security of their information. It also arrives on the heels of the new $787 billion economic stimulus bill, about $20 billion of which is earmarked to encourage health care organizations to adopt electronic health records as a way to reduce the number of medical errors and save money. The stimulus bill, in itself, contains srict privacy and security regulations for patient information. The standards took about 18 months to devise and can be implemented by organizations of any size, according to HITRUST. "2009 will be a turning point for information security in the health care industry, when organizations will begin implementing the framework...and create a cascading effect that will impact and benefit the entire health care ecosystem," Daniel Nutkis, CEO of HITRUST, said in news release. Wilson said the framework also will enable companies such as McKesson to show their customers and business partners that they are taki

Bring up the subject of digitizing medical records and you're likely to get a paradox of a discussion. Everyone thinks it will help save money and improve health care, and everyone has grave reservations. Get ready to hear more as a massive economic stimulus bill works its way through Congress, which includes IT health care spending measures. Although lawmakers are close to pulling the trigger. ensuring the privacy of patients' electronic health records (EHR) remains a top concern. "I very firmly believe that the Achilles heel of health IT is privacy," said Sen. Jim Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat who chaired a hearing this morning examining the appropriate safeguards government should insist on before it doles out billions of dollars to help providers computerize patients' records. Champions of health IT argue that EHRs and interoperable systems to integrate data among providers would drive down healthcare costs while greatly reducing medical errors. Just 17 percent of physicians currently have even basic EHRs. The Center for Disease Control has estimated that as many as 98,000 preventable deaths occur in U.S. hospitals each year, many of which could presumably been avoided with more accessible patient data. "If 100,000 Americans were being killed by anything else, we'd be at war," Whitehouse said.

Electronic medical recordkeeping may not cut the overall cost of care, but by eliminating redundant procedures and reducing errors, quality may be improved. When physician Andrew Wiesenthal needs to work out a problem, he runs around Lake Merritt, across the street from his Oakland (Calif.) office at Kaiser Permanente. As one of the main drivers behind Kaiser's decades-long, multibillion-dollar effort to overhaul the way patient health records are kept, Wiesenthal has had a lot of laps to run. Doctors and other medical professionals across the country will be working through similar challenges in the coming years. President Barack Obama plans to spend $17.2 billion to induce care providers to maintain patient records electronically, scrapping the current paper-based system. The Obama Administration wants electronic health records for every American by 2014. Obama's predecessor also made a big push for electronic recordkeeping, and many doctors and hospital administrators see upgrading recordkeeping as a good way to improve care. Yet, fewer than 2% of acute care hospitals have a comprehensive electronic health record system in place, with another 8% to 12% using a basic system, according to a study published by The New England Journal of Medicine in March. Adoption isn't much better among physicians. Only 4% have a comprehensive system in place, with another 13% using basic systems, according to a study published in the journal in July. Kaiser Permanente is one of the few exceptions. Today, all of its medical clinics and two-thirds of its hospitals operate in a paperless environment and the rest are scheduled to be completely digitized by next year. Across the system, about 14,000 physicians access electronic medical records for 8.7 million patients in nine states and the District of Columbia.

Diplomats and civil servants are to be warned about the danger of putting details of their family and career on social networking websites. The advice comes after the wife of Sir John Sawers, the next head of MI6, put family details on Facebook - which is accessible to millions of internet users. Lady Sawers disclosed details such as the location of the London flat used by the couple and the whereabouts of their three children and of Sir John's parents. She put no privacy protection on her account, allowing any of Facebook's 200 million users in the open-access London network to see the entries. Lady Sawers' half-brother, Hugo Haig-Thomas, a former diplomat, was among those featured in family photographs on Facebook. Mr HaigThomas was an associate and researcher for David Irving, the controversial historian who was jailed in Austria in 2006 after pleading guilty to Holocaust denial. Patrick Mercer, the Conservative chairman of the Commons counter-terrorism sub-committee, said that the entries were a serious error and potentially damaging.

President-elect Barack Obama has promised to computerize all of America's medical records within five years. He made the pledge last week in a speech at George Mason University. "This will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests," he said. "But it just won't save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system." But the road to digitized medical records will be a tough and expensive one, CNN Money reported. Today, only about 8% of the country's 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians use electronic medical records. There is also the issue of patient privacy. Numerous hospitals have faced security issues since moving to electronic medical records. The Industry Standard reported on a security breach at a Los Angeles hospital last month. And then there is the cost. Studies done by Harvard, RAND and the Commonwealth Fund peg the cost of the digitization plan between at least $75 billion to $100 billion, according to the CNN article. However, the health care industry spends $2 trillion dollars a year, so the $100 billion may be well worth the long-term savings.

Privacy & security are individual rights and responsibilities, not just corporate or governmental responsibilities. Reliance on technology is bound to fail without motivation for all involved to find mutual benefits.

Identity theft and security is always in the spotlight through the constant stream of news stories about companies losing confidential customer or client data, such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, health histories and so forth. These "breaking news" stories now seem to happen so frequently that we scarcely pay attention to them unless, of course, we are directly impacted by them. They have, however, heightened the public awareness and have even spawned new identity protection businesses. Information technology companies rightly react to this by developing new technologies to improve security and eagerly market these to CIOs as a way to protect the personal information of their customers and clients. While we should use these appropriately, we can't rely just on technology for identity protection. While some of these security incidents involve someone hacking into a system, many involve a human failing. Examples include a laptop with confidential information being lost or stolen and employees e-mailing sensitive data to their personal e-mail accounts so they can work on it from home.