[SecurityRatty] tag: laymans

Employee fraud hits Baptist Health in Arkansas

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:00:20 +0000

Technorati Tag: Security Breach

Date Reported:
7/2/08

Organization:
Baptist Health*

*Baptist Health is the largest not-for-profit healthcare organization in Arkansas

Contractor/Consultant/Branch:
None

Victims:
Patients

Number Affected:
~1,800

Types of Data:
"name, address, date of birth, Social Security number, and reason for coming to Baptist Health"

Breach Description:
"LITTLE ROCK (AP) - A North Little Rock woman has been arrested for using financial information from patients at Baptist Health to illegally obtain Wal-Mart gift cards for her own use. The hospital has notified about 1,800 patrons of the ID theft."

Reference URL:
Associated Press via WXVT Channel 15 News
KARK Channel 4 News
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Report Credit:
Toby Manthey, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Response:
From the online sources cited above:

Baptist Health has sent letters warning about 1,800 patients that the hospital system’s records may have been breached
[Evan] Uh, "may have been breached"?!

The notification came after the arrest of a Baptist Health employee at a Wal-Mart store on 25 counts of financial identity fraud.
[Evan] Wouldn't life be grand if we could trust our employees? Maybe, I suppose.

The letters, mailed last week, follow the firing of the woman in early June

North Little Rock police say Tamara Hill, 30, of that city worked at Baptist Health Medical Center-North Little Rock in the emergency department.

Hill, an admissions clerk, was arrested May 30 at the Wal-Mart

Ebony Flowers, 25, also of North Little Rock, was arrested at the store the same day on three counts of identity fraud

Flowers was listed in a police report as a janitor for the North Little Rock School District
[Evan] Key word is "was".

Baptist Health recorded more than 950,000 patient visits systemwide in 2007, a number that includes repeat visits.

Mark Lowman, spokesman for the Little Rock-based Baptist Health system, confirmed that the system fired the employee after notification of the arrest.

Police reports say the women used a victim’s personal information to obtain temporary Wal-Mart "account authorization numbers" - credit cards, essentially - used to buy Wal-Mart gift cards.

The victim reported to police that he had not authorized the transactions

the same victim confirmed he was a Baptist Health patient

He expressed appreciation of the handling of the case by the system and by the North Little Rock police.

Among the items found during a search connected with the arrest of Hill was personal information for 24 other people, including "screen shots" - printouts showing the exact appearance of the images on a computer screen - that showed victims’ personal information.
[Evan] This seems like confirmation that "may have been breached" is not all that accurate.

Also found were four Wal-Mart gift cards and $ 1,490 in cash

Police found a small bag of marijuana on Flowers, according to the reports. In a search connected with her arrest, they also discovered a. 25-caliber magazine with six bullets, as well as a receipt for four of the gift cards and information on three-identity theft victims.
[Evan] A thug.

The U. S. Secret Service is helping with the investigation.

"Due to a breach of our information systems security policies, there is a possibility that some personal information, such as your name, address, date of birth, Social Security number, and reason for coming to Baptist Health, was accessed by an unauthorized person."
[Evan] This is from the letter to the victims.

No information in the patient’s "medical records" and no information about the patient’s diagnosis or prognosis was accessed

while no "medical record" information was accessed, the letter mentioned the patient’s "reason for coming" to the system possibly was accessed

Lowman said a reason stated by a patient using the system isn’t considered medical information because the reason is a layman’s explanation, not one from a medical professional.
[Evan] This is Mark Lowman, spokesman for the Little Rock-based Baptist Health system

He said the breach wouldn’t violate the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

But Pam Dixon, executive director of the San Diego-based World Privacy Forum, a privacy advocacy group, thinks all the information mentioned in the letter falls under HIPAA.

"It doesn’t matter that [it’s not ] a prognosis or diagnosis," she said.
[Evan] Splitting hairs. The bottom line is that confidential personal information was stolen and there are victims. Whether or not it is a HIPAA violation seems somewhat irrelevant.

Dixon found the system’s letter lacking in several respects, such as clarifying the exact meaning of a "reason for coming to Baptist Health." The letter also should have mentioned when and for how long the breach occurred, she said.

"Almost all breach letters have that," Dixon added.
[Evan] Almost all breach letters have what? A mention about for how long the breach occurred? I must be reading some of the wrong breach letters because it seems to me that this information is 50/50 at best. Also missing is the "we have no reason to believe that the information will be misused", but this one doesn't fit does it?

Dixon said Baptist Health should have offered in the letter to set up free credit monitoring for victims.
[Evan] Why? One year (or two) of credit monitoring is almost useless. Credit monitoring alerts a victim after fraud has already occurred and one year (or two) of monitoring is too limited for information that has a much longer lifespan. I guess credit monitoring would be better than nothing, but not by much.

Lowman said the health system continually conducts audits to know which staff members are accessing what information, and whether or not the access is appropriate.
[Evan] Good!

"We’re always looking to provide better audits and better oversight of private, confidential and protected information," Lowman said.
[Evan] And Good!

Commentary:
Preventing and detecting employee fraud has always been a challenge. This doesn't mean we give up though. We have some tools at our disposal such as employee background checks, role-based access control, segregation of duties, and job rotation to name a few.

I don't think that these two crooks are anything more than common criminals. The fact of the matter is that identity theft and fraud are very easy crimes to commit and require very little skill.

Past Breaches:
Unknown

The ART of Event Processing: Agility, Reuse, Transparency

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:49:13 +0000

The other day I discussed CEP in Layman’s Terms: Reuse and Agility. Today, our topic is CEP and transparency. One of the major benefits of “white box” event processing solutions is transparency, something not readily available or obvious in black-box solutions.

Friend and colleague John Bates, Progress Apama, often discusses the benefits of white-box algorithmic trading platforms in terms of increased time-to-market and other competitive advantages. I agree with John and would like to point out that there is another key benefit, in simple layman’s terms, transparency.

For example, let’s say you have designed an event processing solution for operational risk management (ORM). It is time for your favorite auditors to come by and they wish to take a look at what is going on with that proprietary black-box ORM applications running quietly in the server room.

The nice auditors ask you, “What does that application do?” and you reply “Well, it looks for evidence of insider trading,” and they ask “Do you mind if we ask how?” and you respond “Good question, do you mind to wait a moment while I get you the contact info for the vendor because we don’t have access to the source code or the actual key indicators (KIs)?”

Now, let’s look at the white-box scenario:

Again, the nice auditors ask you, “What does that application do?” and you reply “Well, it looks for evidence of insider trading,” and they ask “Do you mind if we ask how?” and you respond “Yes, sit down and we will pull up our insider trading key indicator models. These models are stored in XML format and viewable in our graphical KI design studio. We can print out the KI models for insider trading if you like!” and the smiling auditor says “Thank you, your system is much more transparent than the last place we visited!”

This scenario also applies in looking for why certain KIs were not detected that should have been; or when performing a root cause analysis to see why the KI you used in your ~~wrong~~ business decision was inaccurate.

So, CEP in layman’s terms is what we might refer to as the ART of event processing:

Agility
Reuse
Transparency

Please feel free to reuse these idea, but please don’t forget to reference the author and this blog

CEP in Laymans Terms: Reuse and Agility

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:08:20 +0000

We often hear a lot about the core benefits of SOA, which include reuse and agility.

This week, I was in a meeting with Manoo Ordeedolchest, Board Member of Software Park, Thailand, Former President of the Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA), Former Dean, The School of Technology, Shinawatra University and a Lecturer at Chulalongkorn University, National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA), as well as other universities.

We were discussing CEP and our proposed CEP Center of Excellence concept for Software Park. One of the topics we touched upon today was CEP “in layman’s terms.” After some brainstorming about CEP, it we were moved to draw a parallel between the SOA and CEP concepts of IT agility and reuse.

Just as SOA is centered around service component reuse and the agility to create new applications from service components quickly and economically; CEP can be considered to be centered around the reuse and sharing of domain knowledge, key indicators (KIs) and other intellectual property (like analytics) when processing events.

In an SOA, we modularize services and a service-component architecture in order to share services and build new applications from these service components.

One of the business goals of CEP is to modularize and standardize declarative programming logic and reuse this logic with event processing platforms from a variety of vendors. This permits both reuse and agility when building event processing applications, at the application logic level versus the SOA service component level.

So, in laymen’s terms CEP can be discussed using the same SOA concepts of reuse and agility, applied to event processing application logic and KIs.

In a future post, I will talk about about CEP and transparency in layman’s terms.

Systems programmers help people

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:49:52 +0000

Way back in the 1970s, I attended a banquet at RIT, for incoming or prospective students. My assigned seat placed me next to another intended Computer Science major.

I had cut my teeth in high school on some Basic programming (on a Xerox Sigma mainframe and a Wang 2200B), then self-taught myself APL and IBM/360 assembly language (paying for access at UR to an APL terminal, and editing object decks on the keypunch to save money while debugging assembly language programs).

My dinnermate at the banquet had had no such experience. So in choosing her major and concentration, she had to depend on the layman’s descriptions she heard during a college visit. You see, application programmers write programs that actually do things. Meanwhile, system programmers work on the operating system.

What’s an operating system? Well, it doesn’t do anything itself, it’s just there to help people write application programs.

Why did she choose Computer Science with a system programming concentration? “I like to help people.”