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Vermont Victimized By Virus
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-01-30
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A bot attack against a state computer in Vermont may have yielded information on 70,000 people to the criminals responsible for the intrusion.
 | | Vermont Victimized By Virus |  |
Financial and personal information exposed in December 2006 to the attack belonged to some 12,000 people the state listed as being three months or more behind on child support payments. But the additional 58,800 names that came from New England Federal Credit Union included people who were not part of that program.
That data from the credit union was a couple of years old, and the Rutland Herald reported it should not have been retained on the Agency of Human Services server as it was.
It is not known if any of the data has been misused, according to one state official cited in the report. They will begin notifying people impacted by the breach to let them know what has happened.
As to how it happened, WCAX-TV said it was an automated attack that found a way into the system:
"It wasn't a targeted malicious attack, but it did exploit one of the vulnerabilities in the system and through the course of our investigations we felt we need to let people know their information may have been exposed," says Tom Murray, Vt. Chief Information Officer.
Details of the attack and of the server have not been revealed. The Agency said the server in use has been taken offline. The current Agency website runs on Windows Server 2003, according to Netcraft, and other state.vt.us sites also run on Windows.
If a vulnerability was exploited, that means the attack either hit a previously undisclosed, zero-day issue, or that a known issue was not patched in a timely fashion. Should the latter scenario be the true one, there will probably be repercussions for the administrators after the forensic investigation has been completed.
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Tag: Vermont
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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