Wednesday, April 11, 2012

inSecurity News for the Week

When the US Army found it difficult to locate IT people with the correct certifications, it did the only logical thing it could: lowered the requirements.

Hey, remember the break-in to the Utah Department of Health's Medicaid server?  It turns out the damage is just a teeny bit worse than suspected, to the tune of ten percent (280,000 Social Security numbers).  Ah, what's a decimal place or two?

The Department of Justice just seized more than $896,000 and seven domain names for selling counterfeit sports apparel.  Isn't it great to see your tax dollars hard at work (supporting large manufacturers)?

Just in case you thought the TSA could manage to stay out of the news for a day, another TSA worker has been charged with child porn.

Perhaps next time you buy a cell phone it will come with the new Broadcom chip that can help locate you to within centimeters! Won't it be nice to know that Faceyspaces can locate and market to you while you're in the mall or an underground parking facility?  Or worse?

Just in case you wondered why unmanned drones are being used by local police, check out this guy, who got arrested and will be suing.  No good will come of drones.


Dear Readers: please keep your systems patched, antivirused, and up to date.  Windows is releasing a boatload of fixes to their buggy operating system.  Java and Flash will now auto-update if you allow them to.  Regardless of whether you use linux or one of the inferior operating systems, you need to keep everything current.  This includes you 600,000 infected Macs.

Remember - the majority of hacks are caused by not patching.


2 comments:

  1. I don't even know what counterfeit sports apparel is?

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  2. I'd guess shirts with sports team logos or something. Not that it's right, but I have issues with gov't being the strong arm for copyright holders.

    ReplyDelete