Proprietary Microsoft 'Clown Computing' Down Again, Other Security Incidents

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 26, 2023

• New Microsoft 365 outage causes Exchange Online connectivity issues

  Microsoft is investigating ongoing Microsoft 365 issues preventing some Exchange Online customers from accessing their mailboxes.

  "We've identified an issue affecting Exchange Online connectivity for users in North America and are investigating further," the company tweeted earlier.

  "More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX546390."

• Security updates for Tuesday [LWN.net]

  Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox, java-11-openjdk, and thunderbird), Debian (apache2), Fedora (kernel), Oracle (emacs), Red Hat (emacs, haproxy, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, pcs, pki-core:10.6, and qatzip), and SUSE (avahi, cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, giflib, kernel, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-tools- container, virt-operator-container, ovmf, and protobuf-c).

• Former Methodist employees plead guilty to HIPAA violations

  There’s an update to a case announced in November 2022 in which five former Methodist Hospital employees in Memphis Tennessee were charged with criminal violations of HIPAA.

  According to the indictment, between November 2017 and December 2020, the five were charged with conspiring with Roderick Harvey to unlawfully disclose patient information in violation HIPAA. Harvey paid Kirby Dandridge, Sylvia Taylor, Kara Thompson, Melanie Russell, and Adrianna Taber to provide him with names and phone numbers of Methodist patients who had been involved in motor vehicle accidents.

  Harvey then sold the information to third parties that included personal injury attorneys and chiropractors.

• Elk Grove Unified School District investigating after employees report issues filing taxes

  The Elk Grove Unified School District confirmed Monday it is investigating tax filing issues for some of its employees.

  KCRA 3 first received a tip about the potential identity theft two weeks ago but heard about official action from the district on Friday when we obtained a survey sent to some district employees.