Category: News

Lurie said progress has been made in using technology to improve communications and pandemic surveillance but that more investment was needed.

As a step toward establishing methods to measure whether a community is ready for a large-scale health emergency, RAND recently convened an expert panel to come to a clear definition of public health preparedness.

http://govhealthit.com/article102525-04-20-07-Web

The exec explained that Six Flags, which owns 29 parks in the U.S. and Mexico, is in the middle of a major IT restructuring, which involves “segmenting” different parts of the business for security purposes.

“For example,” he said, “if we bring Kodak in to sell photos to our customers, they are on their segment and it can’t be hacked into.”

Encryption was also high on the agenda during the panel debate, prompted by the apparent ambivalence of many IT managers toward the technology. Just over a quarter of respondents confirmed that they encrypt laptop data, although only 8 percent lock down data on all devices, such as USB drives.

The biggest gripe from the panelists concerned the lack of security for portable media such as USB drives, which is something of an ongoing source of frustration for many IT managers.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=122196&WT.svl=news2_2

Lynette Copland, who works at Carmarthenshire College in west Wales, successfully sued her employer for breaching the Human Rights convention. Mrs Copland said there had been a “clash of personalities” with Mr Wrentmore, who left the college shortly after the episode for reasons of ill health and who died in January.

It was argued the monitoring was to determine whether Mrs Copland was using the college’s facilities for “personal purposes.” But the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the surveillance without her knowledge “amounted to an interference with her right to a private life”. At the time of the offences there was no general right to privacy in English law but the implementation of the Human Rights Act in 2000 legally protected privacy rights in domestic law.

Liberty said the ruling, on 3 April, meant employers would have to make employees aware if their communications could be monitored and there would have to be a good reason for such monitoring in every case.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/6559873.stm

“They put in Windows with no intention of ever patching it, and then they are surprised when they get hit by a worm,” Graham says. Or they avoid patching and vulnerability testing because these processes pose risks of their own for SCADA systems –introducing other bugs to their highly sensitive and uptime-demanding systems, for instance. “They are managed by a Pearl Harbor-type mentality,” Graham says.

Attacks exploiting the latest OPC bugs could be avoided if logins were required in the app because the attacker needs login privileges to do his dirty work.

“Auditing is not as in-depth in my opinion or as transparent for SCADA” as it is for other industries. And some security experts say commercial IDS/IPS, antivirus, and SIM products don’t really fit for SCADA.

Mark Fabro, CEO of Lofty Perch, which makes SIM solutions for the water utility industry as well as other critical infrastructure companies, says commercial IDS/IPS and SIM systems don’t map well to industry control systems, where there are thousands of different protocols, many of them proprietary.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=121887

Analysts at the Farmington, Conn.-based company studied data from media reports, as well as several industry analyst reports, to develop the tool’s proprietary algorithms.

“Until now, organizations have struggled to assess the scope of their financial risk should they be hit with a data loss incident,” said Adam Sills, a lead underwriter with Darwin, in a written statement.

According to Darwin, organizations can use the Tech//404 Data Loss Cost Calculator to estimate their financial exposure in three categories: internal investigation expenses; customer notification and crisis management expenses, and regulatory/compliance expenses.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=121698&WT.svl=cmpnews2_1

The prototype so far has focused on one subset of RFID, the 13.56 ISO 15693 tags that are typically used in credit card and smart card applications.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/08/rfid_guardian/