Vulnerabilities


Employee Sends Medicaid Info of 228K To His Yahoo! Account

A South Carolina man was arrested yesterday on charges stemming from a data breach that may have leaked personal information on more than 200,000 Medicaid beneficiaries in the state, including their names, phone numbers, addresses, birth dates and Medicare ID numbers according to a report in the newspaper The State.


Oracle yesterday released 88 security fixes for vulnerabilities — including several that allow for remote access without authentication — across its portfolio as part of its quarterly Critical Patch Update.”Due to the threat posed by a successful attack, Oracle strongly recommends that customers apply CPU fixes as soon as possible,” the company said in its CPU advisory.

The U.S. and other advanced nations face a drastic cyber security skills gap. Attacks from sophisticated and unsophisticated attackers are on the rise, even as more and more companies and government agencies move more of what they do online to Web based services and the cloud. Of course, the skills gap requires a bottom-up rethink of the way that technology skills are taught at both the primary and secondary level. That’s no easy task in a decentralized and highly regulated education system such as the one that exists in the U.S. where resources are addressed more towards basic skill acquisition than to teaching advanced cyber skills. Still, the Obama Administration has put cyber security at the top of its domestic and military security agendas, and there’s some evidence of positive change. 

Apple has released another fix for Java that also is designed to remove several of the variants of the Flashback Trojan that have been plaguing Mac users for months now. The update, released on Thursday, is the latest in a series of attempts by the company to address the Flashback situation.

Researchers have known for a long time that many users don’t pay much attention to updating the third-party software, browser plugins and extensions, and that lack of care has been to the benefit of attackers for years. Attacks on Flash, Java, QuickTime and various other ubiquitous apps have been a major concern for Windows users for the better part of a decade, and now that same situation is presenting itself to Mac users.