Skip to main content

Data Security breaches at both US and UK government installations!

This only goes to show that stuff has leaked all the time. It's time to secure those phreaking data theft and breaches!

Dear CIO, please read my lips:

Get a physical on your data security, get a barking dog like Gordon Ramsey in your shop and do the audit! Your trusted partner could have deployed some sub-contractors or its own incompetent staff, who have no idea what security is all about.

PLEASE GET A PHYSICAL ON YOUR DATA!

This story is about a data theft of entire prison population in U.K:

Another month, another high profile government data breach. This time the blame lies with a contractor, PA Consulting, which mislaid a USB storage device containing unencrypted data on the entire population of the UK’s prisons.

According to a Home Office spokesperson, amongst the data were the home addresses of 30,000 repeat offenders and 10,000 “prolific and priority offenders.”

The data came from the government’s JTrack system, which allows police to monitor the whereabouts of convicted criminals and for which PA Consulting provides support.
and this one goes even further, it happened in U.S, Department of Homeland security got hacked!

Hackers broke into the Department of Homeland Security’s phone network and made $12,000 worth of calls to the Middle East and Asia last weekend.

The compromised PBX system belonged to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and had only recently been installed, but it appears a hole was left open by a contractor during the upgrade, according to FEMA spokesman Tom Olshanski.

Calls were made to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Yemen, and most were about three minutes long. Provider Sprint detected the fraud over the weekend and halted the calls.

Time to wake up!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus

Splunk that!

Saw this advert on Slashdot and went on to look for it and found the tour pretty neat to look at. Check out the demo too! So why would I need it? WHY NOT? I'd say. As an organization grows , new services, new data comes by, new logs start accumulating on the servers and it becomes increasingly difficult to look at all those logs, leave alone that you'd have time to read them and who cares about analysis as the time to look for those log files already makes your day, isn't it? Well a solution like this is a cool option to have your sysadmins/operators look at ONE PLACE and thus you don't have your administrators lurking around in your physical servers and *accidentally* messing up things there. Go ahead and give it a shot by downloading it and testing it. I'll give it a shot myself! Ok so I went ahead and installed it. Do this... [root@tarrydev Software]# ./splunk-Server-1.0.1-linux-installer.bin to install and this (if you screw up) [root@tarrydev Software]# /op