http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/120413-open-source-georgia-tech-276573.html
By Jon Gold
Network World
December 04, 2013
An academic exercise by a security researcher blossomed into a live-fire
infosec emergency last month, after a major vulnerability was found in a
central U.S. government healthcare database system.
Georgia Tech graduate student Doug Mackey didn’t set out to fix a
potentially disastrous issue in a major government healthcare records
system -- originally, he’d simply meant to outline the relative
vulnerability of large government computer systems in general to attacks
by foreign governments, as a final project for a Master's in Information
Security degree.
He settled on the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology
Architecture, or VistA, an open-source framework used by the Department of
Veterans Affairs as a test case. The VA says it's the single largest
integrated healthcare system in the U.S., serving 6 million patients per
year.
“As much as possible for an independent researcher I wanted to study the
security of software used within a real system in a critical economic
sector,” he says. “The Health sector and VistA were chosen because VistA
is open source and all the source code is easily available. Using the open
source code I set-up an isolated lab test system to study.”
Mackey's code review found an alarming vulnerability in VistA that could
have been used to execute “thousands” of remote commands, without any
authorization, on these health records databases. But at first, he had
trouble sounding the alarm.
[...]
--
Find the best InfoSec talent without breaking your
recruiting budget! Post a Job, $99 for 31 days.
Hot InfoSec Jobs - http://www.hotinfosecjobs.com/
