feed on feeds - 2016/03/29 - items 0 to 15

coondoggie quotes a report from Network World: The fraud and scam war rages. This week the Federal Courts warned of swindles involving people posing as federal court officials and U.S. Marshals targeting citizens, threatening them with arrest unless they pay some fake fine for failing to show up for jury duty. "This year's scams are more aggressive and sophisticated than we've seen in years past," says Melissa Muir, Director of Administrative Services for the U.S. District Court of Western Washington in a statement. "Scammers are setting up call centers, establishing call-back protocols and using specific names and designated court hearing times." The bottom line: A federal court will never threaten an individual or demand the immediate payment -- either over the telephone or money wire service -- for fines or for not responding to a jury summons, the court stated.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Judge rules "reasonable doubt" after Israeli soldier caught on video shooting wounded Palestinian in the head.

PMDB party's decision to leave coalition decreases possibility Dilma Rousseff will survive pressure for her impeachment.

An anonymous reader writes: A security researcher found two bypasses in Valve's game review process that eventually allowed him to publish Steam Trading Cards and a full game on the Steam Store called "Watch Paint Dry" (reference to this case from last month involving the British film censors). The game was supposed to be an April Fools' Day prank, but the researcher forgot to set a release date, and [the game] was published on the Steam Store last weekend. Valve has fixed the security bypass in the meantime. These bypasses were extremely dangerous since they allowed anyone to publish games on the Store (possibly containing malware) without a Valve employee ever taking a look at them, or knowing they went through the review process.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More evidence surfaces of security missteps and communication failures one week after deadly attacks in Belgium.

An anonymous reader writes: IT staff at multiple hospitals have been forced to stop all routine and net new operations and perform an all hands on deck emergency malware control effort in the last several weeks. The latest instance of this can be seen at MedStar Hospital. From a ZDNet report, "Malware has infected the computer network of MedStar Health, forcing the healthcare provider to shut down large portions of its electronic operations. A statement by the health system said that all facilities remain open, and that there was "no evidence of compromised information." The not-for-profit healthcare system operates ten hospitals across the Washington and Baltimore region, with more than a hundred outpatient health facilities. According to the system's website, it has more than 31,000 employees and serves hundreds of thousands of patients annually." This outbreak appears to be fairly widespread and not limited to the single story listed. A similar story appeared on Slashdot several weeks ago and a quick search on Google provides multiple hits that indicate that this type of incident is much more commonplace than I would have believed. Hospitals provide round the clock service to patients and many of these services are critical to the health of the hospital clients. Most hospitals invest significant resources into security. Vendors may limit local IT staff in terms of how well a turnkey solution is designed to prevent infection. In short, hospital IT staff seem to be in the position of having to respond to rather than prevent these types of incidents. IT analysts predicted that 2015 would be the year that hospitals became targets for hackers. It appears that 2015 was just the first wave of the potential storm coming that is headed directly towards our healthcare IT infrastructure. How can hospitals guard themselves against these attacks when perpetrators can adapt almost instantly to new security measures while hospitals are constrained by operating concerns?