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EH. Security News and Views for the world. Some Facebook apps found to be collecting, selling user information. Facebook users keen to maintain some form of privacy will want to take note of the following findings from the Wall Street Journal.
In essence, the Journal has determined that all of the 10 most popular apps on Facebook are transmitting user IDs to outside entities. In addition, another three of these top applications have also been sending personal information pertaining to a user's friends to outside companies. There is no denying that Facebook goes to great lengths to limit the kind of data developers are allowed to collect. Ponemon: Data breaches cost healthcare $6 billion a year. The U.S. healthcare system is expensive, but it could be less so if data breaches weren't costing it billions of dollars every year.
The Ponemon Institute and the security consulting firm ID Expert released a report this week finding that hospitals are opening themselves up to a loss of $6 billion annually because of data breaches, eWeek's Brian T. Horowitz reports. Part of the data vulnerability stems from a lack of resources and procedures to detect breaches. As hospitals and other providers have hurried to meet the federal electronic health records requirements spelled out in the 2009 HITECH Act, they have left themselves vulnerable to attack.
Although the law includes privacy provisions, providers do not appear to be significantly increasing privacy protections, according to Doug Pollack, vice president of strategy for ID Expert. Data Privacy Day and Facebook. Leading up to Data Privacy Day this Friday, someone hacked into the Facebook fan page of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The company reportedly attributed the breach to a software bug and said Wednesday that it had been repaired, but in the meantime it was busy rolling out a new security initiative that will let potential hackers see photos of your "friends. " Instead of requiring you to type distorted words that a computer has a hard time recognizing (a technique called "captcha") to authenticate yourself, Facebook is trying out a new kind of "social authentication" which requires you to identify pictures of your friends from a list of possible names.
"Hackers halfway across the world might know your password, but they don't know who your friends are," wrote Facebook's Alex Rice in a post on the company blog Wednesday. It's hard to know where to begin examining the irony here.