October 19, 2011
A fifth of IT professionals have admitted that they may not cope with the consequences of a major security breach. An organiser’s survey ahead of this week’s IP Expo found that 18 per cent felt they would be unable to cope with the fallout of a major breach. The survey of 175 IT professionals from UK businesses of varying sizes also found that 44 per cent spent at least a quarter of their time on IT security, with 23 per [...]
October 18, 2011
Better use of information technology in England’s hospitals could help prevent 16,000 deaths a year, a report says. University Hospitals Birmingham has recommended its system to the team investigating above-average death rates from 2005 to 2008 at Stafford Hospital. The trust says it saw a 17% fall in deaths among emergency patients over 12 months, which would equate to 16,000 deaths prevented across England. Systems include a computer reminding staff to give patients their drugs. The trust says IT surveillance [...]
A key web security system is no better defended now than when hackers undermined it earlier this year. So said Taher Elgamal, creator of the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) technology that is used to keep many different types of web transaction safe. SSL came under attack in September when hackers stole credentials that let them pose as almost any web firm. The stolen credentials were used to eavesdrop on the Gmail accounts of about 300,000 people. Read the rest of [...]
October 17, 2011
Just under half of businesses who use web filtering technology have experienced a security breach due to unsafe internet use by employees. According to a survey of 200 IT decision-makers at small- to medium-sized businesses by GFI Software, 40 per cent of businesses have experienced a security breach due to employees visiting a site that hosted malware – while 55 per cent that use a web monitoring solution said defence against infected websites is not a priority. Of those who [...]
NHS patients believe that hospital chief executives and management should be held accountable for healthcare privacy protection and breaches. According to a survey of 1,001 patients across the UK, 97 per cent say NHS managers should have a legal and ethical duty to protect their data; 90 per cent agree that where there are significant risks of privacy breaches, managers should take appropriate action to minimise or eliminate them. Of those surveyed, 87 per cent felt that managers should be [...]
October 11, 2011
London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton on Monday officially launched the technology hub set to play a key role at the Olympics next year and revealed the exhaustive measures put in place to safeguard the infrastructure from attack or systems failure. The Technology Operations Centre (TOC) for the London Olympics contains 180 servers that will be maintained by 450 professionals over the 16 days of the Olympics games and the 12 days of the Paralympics. The London Organising Committee of [...]
October 7, 2011
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has reported that a school and a school union breached the Data Protection Act following the loss of laptops. It reported that the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) breached the act in May 2011 when a laptop was stolen from an employee’s home. Enquires found that while the laptop had encryption software installed on it, the decision on whether or not to encrypt individual documents was left to the employee. At the time [...]
A complete ban or holistic approach to USB devices is needed by the NHS to prevent data losses. At the start of this week, it was reported that a USB stick containing patient information of 800 people had been lost by East Surrey Hospital. After that loss, which occurred in September 2010, no victim had been informed. Marc Lee, sales director EMEA at Courion, said that a holistic approach to data security is needed to involve comprehensive risk assessment and [...]
October 3, 2011
East Surrey Hospital lost the medical details of 800 people on an unencrypted memory stick, a report reveals. Patients’ medical information such as of operations details, names and dates of birth were lost in September 2010 and never recovered. Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust which runs the hospital made the admissions in an annual 2010/11 report seen by the Observer. The 800 affected people were never informed and nine other ‘near misses’, where information was mislaid but found, were [...]
Online gambling firm Betfair admitted today it had not informed its customers that the details of millions of credit cards were stolen in a major cyber-attack 18 months ago. More than 3.1 million account names with encrypted security questions, 2.9 million usernames, and nearly 90,000 account usernames with bank account details were stolen in an attack in March last year. Betfair said it did not inform its registered customers of the attack as its security measures made the data unusable [...]
