For the past week I've been receiving hundreds of e-mails from a user
apparently infected with the "SirCam" virus.
Ho-hum, old risk, nothing new.
But in this case the virus has included an interesting document scavenged
from the user's computer. The infected machine appears to belong to a
Clinical Assistant Professor at the UCLA Department of Radiation Oncology,
and the document is a 13 page Word .DOC form titled:
UCLA RADIATION SAFETY DIVISION
APPLICATION for the USE of RADIOISOTOPES
(Human Use)
and includes fields for the name, SSN, and Date-of-birth of all the
personnel involved, radioactive compounds to be used, their dosages, whether
the Principal Investigator has graduated from High School, and so on.
Fortunately in this case the document is not filled out, and the SirCam
virus is apparently "defective" in that each time it runs it is selecting
the same document to send out, but of course it's not much of a stretch to
imagine even more sensitive medical documents being sprayed across the
Internet indiscriminately.
Another example of an organization which Ought To Know Better failing in
basic security, and of the tenacity of recent viruses (or perhaps the
stubbornness of end-users) as UCLA's people have been unable to stem the
tide of e-mail from the virus five days after having been informed of the
problem (though their security people were quick to respond to an e-mail
suggesting that medical documents were being distributed).
P.S. 22 more copies of the virus arrived during the composing of this
message. Oops, 27 now.
[This risk certainly needs to be SirCamVented. PGN] ["Gavin Scott" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 69]
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