30,000 Identities Stolen; Model Hospital IT System Crashes; Navy Tough on Music Downloads; New E-Mail Worm Detected; DoS Attack Targets .Info Domain Server

30,000 Identities Stolen

In a case that is believed to be the largest identity-theft in the nation, a gang of thieves used a computer to gain access to the credit histories of 30,000 people over three years, according to an article in today’s New York Times. The Times reports that the thieves, relying on a low-level employee of a Long Island software company, emptied bank accounts and stole at least $2.7 million. A Washington Post story today says that employee, a computer help-desk worker with access to sensitive passwords from banks and credit companies, has been charged with stealing financial information. He and another man would allegedly get reports from the major credit reporting bureaus using his access to passwords belonging to Ford Motor Credit Co., Washington Mutual Bank and other financial institutions. Model Hospital IT System CrashesBoston Globe reports on a catastrophic computer crash at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, long considered a model of medical IT. The Globe reports that the crisis lasted nearly four days and shut down everything from lab test results to billing.

The

Navy Tough on Music DownloadsWashington Post. The Post reports that punishment could range from loss of leave time to expulsion.

The U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis has seized the computers of about 100 cadets suspected of downloading copyrighted music and movies, according to a story in today’s

New E-Mail Worm DetectedSydney Morning Herald, anti-virus software maker F-Secure has reported the presence of a new e-mail worm called Winevar. The company has ranked it as a level 2 alerta new worm causing large infections which might be local to a specific region. The worm was found in the wild in South Korea toward the end of November. The worm’s file is a Windows PE executable about 91k long written in Microsoft Visual C++. The Herald story provides further technical details.

According to the

DoS Attack Targets .Info Domain ServerCNet News last night, the assault sent nearly 2 million requests per second to each device connecting the network to the Internetmany times greater than normalduring the four hours of peak activity that hit the company early Thursday morning, said Ben Petro, CEO of UltraDNS.

An Internet attack flooded domain name manager UltraDNS with a deluge of data late last week, causing administrators to scramble to keep the servers that host .info and other domains up and running. According to a report by