The Michigan State Department of Technology has announced a potential exposure of personal identifiable information (PII) of nearly 2 million Michigan state employees.
This exposure was due in part to a software update implemented in October 2016 that was provided and performed by a third-party vendor supporting the unemployment benefits computer system. The vendor introduced a vulnerability that allowed authorized users of the Michigan Data Automated System (MiDAS) to access Social Security numbers and names they were not authorized to view.
The information was exposed and unprotected from October 10, 2016, until January 30, 2017, when the error was found and promptly fixed.
The state is in the process f informing the 1.87 million affected employees but does not believe that the exposed data has been accessed or used for any malicious purpose.
DTMB Director and State CIO, David Behen, claims, “Data security is a top priority for the state of Michigan. We will work with our third party vendors and our state team to review our processes and procedures to avoid incidents like this in the future.”
NNT covers an array of compliance mandates, including the United States Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB) and the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) mandate. The USGCB, which evolved from the FDCC, is intended to create security configuration baselines for IT products widely used across federal agencies. The USGCB is a Federal government-wide initiative that provides guidance to agencies on what should be done to improve and maintain effective configuration settings.
The USGCB supersedes the FDCC and is always positioned as a recommendation for security settings, but agencies are invited to implement a build standard with security settings that go beyond the USGCB. NNT Change Tracker can directly utilize the OVAL and SCAP content from the NVD, providing an easy to use and affordable means to automatically audit devices for compliance with USGCB build standards.
Read the official announcement here
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