US Army loses 16,000 personnel records in South Korea

Sensitive information of more than 16,000 US Army personnel stationed in South Korea, plus data on local employees and job applicants, appears to have been compromised after databases loaded with names, identification numbers and addresses were accessed by unauthorised and unknown parties.
Specific details of how the 28 May raid was launched were not disclosed. but banking details and classified data was not compromised.
The Army's South Korean outpost apologised in a letter (PDF) to troops and job seekers signed by US Army Commander Curtis M Scaparrotti.
"United States Forces Korea (USFK) was made aware of a potential theft of personal information from the Korean National Recruitment System maintained by the US Department of the Army," Scaparrotti said.
"We deeply regret and apologise for any inconvenience and concern this matter may cause you. USFK takes this compromise very seriously and is reviewing policies and practices with a view of determining what must be charged to preclude a similar occurrence in the future."
The Army was consulting with senior US and Korean officials over the incident and has pulled the affected machine from its network and switched to a different system to handle employment applications.
One of the most significant breaches to affect Defence occurred in 2008 when an infected USB drive was plugged into a laptop at a US Army base in the Middle East.
Deputy Defence secretary William Lynn said at the time the incident created a "digital beachhead" for further attacks and data exfiltration.
Another major breach occurred in 2009, when a hard drive containing details on 70 million US Army Veterans was sent to a recycling plant without first being irreversibly erased.

Redmond is patching Windows 8 but NOT Windows 7, say security bods

Microsoft has left Windows 7 exposed by only applying patches to its newest operating systems.
Researchers found the gaps after they scanned 900 Windows libraries and uncovered a variety of security functions that were updated in Windows 8 but not in 7. They said the shortcoming could lead to the discovery of zero day vulnerabilities.

The missing safe functions were part of Microsoft's dedicated libraries intsafe.h and strsafe.h that help developers combat various attacks.
Researcher Moti Joseph (@gamepe) - formerly of Websense - speculated Microsoft had not applied fixes to Win 7 to save money.
"Why is it that Microsoft inserted a safe function into Windows 8 [but not] Windows 7? The answer is money - Microsoft does not want to waste development time on older operating systems ... and they want people to move to higher operating systems," Joseph said in a presentation at the Troopers14 conference.
Microsoft has been contacted for comment.
Together with malware analyst Marion Marschalek (@pinkflawd), the duo developed a capable diffing (comparison) tool dubbed DiffRay which would compare Windows 8 with 7, and log any safe functions absent in the older platform.
It was "scary simple", Marschalek said, and faster than finding vulnerabilities by hand.

Security bods could then probe and pluck those functions to identify vulnerabilities and exploits.
In a demonstration of DiffRay, the researchers found four missing safe functions in Windows 7 that were present in 8.
"If we get one zero-day from this project, it's worth it," Joseph said.
Future work will extend DiffRay's capabilities to find potential vulnerabilities in Windows 8.1, add intelligence to trace input values for functions and incorporate more intelligent signatures used to find potential holes. Duplicates and abundant false positives in the current version would also be ironed out.
The presentation slides were available online. (Here in pdf.)