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HealthCare.gov Portal Suffers Data Breach Exposing 75,000 Customers
Sensitive information belonging to roughly 75,000 individuals was exposed after a government healthcare sign-up system got hacked, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said on Friday. The agency said that "anomalous system activity" was detected last week in the Direct Enrollment system, which Americans use to enroll in healthcare plans via the insurance exchange established under the Affordable Care Act -- also known as Obamacare. A breach was declared on Wednesday. It's unclear why the agency, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, chose to not announce the incident sooner. Officials said the hacked portal is used by insurance agents and brokers to help Americans sign up for coverage and that no other systems were involved. The affected system has been disabled. CMS said it hoped to restore it before the end of next week.
"I want to make clear to the public that HealthCare.gov and the Marketplace Call Center are still available, and open enrollment will not be negatively impacted," CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a statement. "We are working to identify the individuals potentially impacted as quickly as possible so that we can notify them and provide resources such as credit protection." |
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| There are no conversations. |
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| cauz |
Oct. 20, 2018, 9:28 a.m. |
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| Elizabeth Edwards |
Successful health reform must not just make health insurance affordable, affordable health insurance has to make health care affordable. |
| Darrell Issa |
Every portal coming into this country is being attacked by those who would harvest information, both national security secrets and just the common information of private individuals and private individuals. That crime is going on, every day, on a single entity known as the Internet. |
| Eric Cantor |
We believe that if you put in place the mechanisms that allow for personal choice as far as Medicare is concerned, as well as the programs in Medicaid, that we can actually get to a better result and do what most Americans are learning how to do, which is to do more with less. |
| Thomas R. Insel |
With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, more people will have insurance coverage and, in principle, be eligible for more care. |
| Barack Obama |
It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label. |
| James Fallows |
I have relentlessly beat the drum for Google's 'two-step' authentication systems for Gmail and other services, which radically reduce the likelihood that your account can be hacked from afar. |
| Thomas R. Insel |
Nearly every business collects metrics on inventory, sales, and workplace process. Health care has been slow to measure these kinds of outcomes. Increasingly, general medicine, via either managed care or large practice settings, is improving by collecting data through electronic records and refining practice based on what works. |
| Laurie Garrett |
Most Americans think that public health is services for poor people, and since most Americans hate poor people and want all poor people's services destroyed, they hate public health. |
| Bernard Ebbers |
Our communications services revenue growth is being driven by continued strong top-line performance in data, Internet and international - three of the fastest growing and most profitable areas within communications services. |
| John Garamendi |
Medicare is a promise we made to seniors more than four decades ago. When President Johnson signed Medicare into law, one in three seniors lived in poverty. Half of seniors had no health coverage at all. |
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China Pilots a System That Rates Citizens on 'Social Credit Score' To Determine Eligibility For Jobs, Travel
Speculations have turned out be true. The Chinese government is now testing systems that will be used to create digital records of citizens' social and financial behavior. In turn, these will be used to create a so-called social credit score, which will determine whether individuals have access to services, from travel and education to loans and insurance cover. Some citizens -- such as lawyers and journalists -- will be more closely monitored. From a report on MIT Technology Review:
Planning documents apparently describe the system as being created to "allow the trustworthy to roa...
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Hackers Broke Into An SEC Database and Made Millions From Inside Information, Says DOJ
Federal prosecutors unveiled charges in an international stock-trading scheme that involved hacking into the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR corporate filing system. "The scheme allegedly netted $4.1 million for fraudsters from the U.S., Russia and Ukraine," reports CNBC. "Using 157 corporate earnings announcements, the group was able to execute trades on material nonpublic information. Most of those filings were 'test filings,' which corporations upload to the SEC's website." From the report:
The scheme involves seven individuals and operated from May to at least October 2016. Prosecutors sa...
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Sweden Accidentally Leaks Personal Details of Nearly All Citizens
Another day, Another data breach!
This time sensitive and personal data of millions of transporters in Sweden, along with the nation's military secrets, have been exposed, putting every individual's as well as national security at risk.
Who exposed the sensitive data? The Swedish government itself.
Swedish media is reporting of a massive data breach in the Swedish Transport Agency (Transportstyrelsen) after the agency mishandled...
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US Voting Server At Heart of Russian Hack Probe Mysteriously Wiped
A computer at the center of a lawsuit digging into Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election has been wiped. "The server in question is based in Georgia -- a state that narrowly backed Donald Trump, giving him 16 electoral votes -- and stored the results of the state's vote-management system," reports The Register. "The deletion of its filesystem data makes analysis of whether the system was compromised impossible to ascertain." From the report:
There is good reason to believe that the computer may have been tampered with: it is 15 years old, and could be harboring all sorts of exploitable software and hardwar...
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Walmart Patents Cart That Reads Your Pulse, Temperature (vice.com) 114
Walmart recently applied to patent biometric shopping handles that would track a shopper's heart rate, palm temperature, grip force, and walking speed. "The patent, titled 'System And Method For A Biometric Feedback Cart Handle' and published August 23, outlines a system where sensors in the cart send data to a server," reports Motherboard. "That server then notifies a store employee to check on individual customers." From the report:
Over time, the server can build a database of data compared against store location and stress response, the patent says -- potentially valuable information for store planning. Other uses o...
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Contractors Lose Jobs After Hacking CIA's In-House Vending Machines
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRepublic:
Today's vending machines are likely to be bolted to the floor or each other and are much more sophisticated -- possibly containing machine intelligence, and belonging to the Internet of Things (IoT). Hacking this kind of vending machine obviously requires a more refined approach. The type security professionals working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might conjure up, according to journalists Jason Leopold and David Mack, who first broke the story A Bunch Of CIA Contractors Got Fired For Stealing Snacks From Vending Machines. In their BuzzFeed post, the...
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Engineers Say They've Created Way To Detect Weapons Using Wi-Fi
The researchers, which include engineers from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), and Binghamton University, published a study this month detailing a method in which common wifi can be used to easily and efficiently identify weapons, bombs, and explosive chemicals in public spaces that don't typically have affordable screening options. The researchers' system uses channel state information (CSI) from run-of-the-mill wifi. It can first identify whether there are dangerous objects in baggage without having to physically rifle through it. It then determines what the material is and what the risk level is. The researchers tested the detection system using 15 different obje...
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Senator Introduces Bill That Would Send CEOs To Jail For Violating Consumer Privacy
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has introduced the Consumer Data Protection Act that "would dramatically beef up Federal Trade Commission authority and funding to crack down on privacy violations, let consumers opt out of having their sensitive personal data collected and sold, and impose harsh new penalties on a massive data monetization industry that has for years claims that self-regulation is all that's necessary to protect consumer privacy," reports Motherboard. From the report:
Wyden's bill proposes that companies whose revenue exceeds $1 billion per year -- or warehouse data on more than 50 million consume...
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By Next Week, Intel Expects To Issue Updates To More Than 90% of Processor Products Introduced Within Past Five Years (intel.com) 181
Posted by msmash on Thursday January 04, 2018 @01:40PM from the fixing-things dept.
Intel said on Thursday that by next week it expects to have patched 90 percent of its processors that it released within the last five years, making PCs and servers "immune" from both the Spectre and Meltdown exploits. The company adds:
Intel has already issued updates for the majority of processor products introduced within the past five years. By the end of next week, Intel expects to have issued updates for more than 90 percent of processor products introduced within the past ...
This post is a comment.
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One Year After Data Breach, Equifax Goes Unpunished
"It's been a year since Equifax doxed the nation of America through carelessness, deception and greed, lying about it and stalling while the problem got worse and worse," writes Cory Doctorow. Equifax's new CSO says they've spent over $200 million on security upgrades, in work being overseen by auditor from eight different states. An anonymous reader quotes Doctorow's response:
This all sounds very good and all, but it's still monumentally unfair. The penalty for Equifax's recklessness should have been the corporate death penalty: charter revoked, company shut down, assets sold to competitors... The fact that Equifax's investors and exec...
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