Millions of Health Records stolen. Again.

And here I am, Sitting at my desk in the middle of a storm, watching twitlive, browsing the internation. What do I come across? Another, Another, Another, Another, Theft of CONFIDENTIAL information. Did the criminal slide in under the cover of darkness, bypass laser security, and swiftly crack into a safe containing a base of backups? Nope, the ever intelligent Network Admin decided to keep the backups in, the back-of his car. Do you want more info on the massacre of confidential information? If you must, read on:

The University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics is currently notifying 2.2 million patients about the theft of medical billing records. On June 2, a box of backup tapes containing patient and guarantors billing records was stolen out of a car belonging to a contracted independent storage company. The tapes contained the personal information on 2.2 million patients and guarantors including patient names, related demographic information and diagnostic codes. In addition, these records contained the Social Security numbers of 1.3 million patients. The Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department, the FBI and the U.S. Postal Service are investigating the theft. According to Lorris Betz, M.D., Ph.D, Senior Vice President for Health Sciences, University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics is taking aggressive steps to protect patient confidentiality including notifying all 2.2 million individual through postal mail, offering one year of free credit monitoring to those whose SSNs were on the tapes and offering a $1,000 reward for the return of the tapes, no questions asked. The University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics has also setup a hotline - 866-581-3599 - and a web site - healthcare.utah.edu/billingrecordstheft - to help answer any questions and provide more information about the theft.

ALERT: MAC OS-X New Exploits

Did you really think your precious Mac was immune? That you were exempt from the Warzone that is the interwebs? Well, unless you have the intelligence of a monkey, this alert doesn't apply. This requires you to actively allow the hacker access, however for easily manipulated clients- you may need to pay heed to this latest alert.

Security vendor SecureMac has discovered multiple variants of a Trojan capable of letting a hacker remotely commandeer a Mac computer.

The malicious code is being distributed from a hacker Web site, where there have been discussions on distributing the Trojan through iChat and LimeWire, said SecureMac, which has given the Trojan a "critical" security rating. The program can infect Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 machines.

A Trojan is a program that appears legitimate, but performs illicit activity when it is run, such as stealing passwords, making the system more vulnerable to future entry, or simply destroying programs or data on the hard disk. LimeWire is a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing program, and iChat is Apple's instant messaging client.

Besides offering a hacker remote access to the system, the Trojan discovered by SecureMac can transmit system and user passwords. Additionally, the application can log keystrokes, take pictures with the built-in camera on a Mac, take screenshots, and turn on file sharing.

The program takes advantage of a flaw within the Apple Remote Desktop Agent. The program avoids detection by opening ports in the firewall and turning off system logging.

The Trojan is distributed as AppleScript called Asthtv05 or as an application bundle called Astht_v06. The filed must be downloaded and opened in order to infect a machine.

Malicious code targeting the Mac isn't new. Apple in May released a patch for a serious vulnerability within its iCal calendar application. The flaw made it possible for an attacker to exploit the vulnerability by adding or modifying files on a CalDAV server. The code is distributed as an .ics calendar file in an e-mail attachment, or through a malicious Web site.