Ever heard of MUMPS? Both programming language and database, it was developed in the 1960s for the Massachusetts General Hospital. The goal was to streamline the increasingly enormous timesink that information and records management had become, a problem that was certain to grow unless something was done. Far from being some historical footnote, MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) grew to be used by a wide variety of healthcare facilities and still runs today. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re in luck because [Asianometry] has a documentary video that’ll tell you everything.

MUMPS had rough beginnings but ultimately found widespread support and use that continues to this day. As a programming language, MUMPS (also known simply as “M”) has the unusual feature of very tight integration with the database end of things. That makes sense in light of the fact that it was created to streamline the gathering, processing, and updating of medical data in a busy, multi-user healthcare environment that churned along twenty-four hours per day.

It may show its age (the term “archaic” — among others — gets used when it’s brought up) but it is extremely good at what it does and has a proven track record in the health care industry. This, combined with the fact that efforts to move to newer electronic record systems always seem to find the job harder than expected, have helped keep it relevant. Have you ever used MUMPS? Let us know in the comments!

And hey, if vintage programming languages just aren’t unusual enough for you, we have some truly strange ones for you to check out.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation, written by authors Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry, and Jason Sadler: When you picture medieval warfare, you might think of epic battles and famous monarchs. But what about the everyday soldiers who actually filled the ranks? Until recently, their stories were scattered across handwritten manuscripts in Latin or French and difficult to decipher. Now, our online database makes it possible for anyone to discover who they were and how they lived, fought and travelled. To shed light on the foundations of our armed services -- one of England's oldest professions -- we launched the Medieval Soldier Database in 2009. Today, it's the largest searchable online database of medieval nominal data in the world. It contains military service records giving names of soldiers paid by the English Crown. It covers the period from 1369 to 1453 and many different war zones. We created the database to challenge assumptions about the lack of professionalism of soldiers during the hundred years war and to show what their careers were really like. In response to the high interest from historians and the public (the database has 75,000 visitors per month), the resource has recently been updated. It is now sustainably hosted by GeoData, a University of Southampton research institute. We have recently added new records, taking the dataset back to the late 1350s, meaning it now contains almost 290,000 entries. [...] We hope the database will continue to grow and go on providing answers to questions about our shared military heritage. We are sure that it will unlock many previously untold stories of soldier ancestors.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft SQL Server databases power many applications that are the lifeblood of businesses in today’s data-driven world. Whether your servers are on-premises or hosted in Azure, your company relies on the availability of your SQL Server instances to power your applications. However, poorly performing databases can have a negative impact on user experience and revenue generation and slow productivity throughout your business.

A significant shift has occurred in the data storage landscape over the last 10 years. Legacy environments saw data centers full of physical servers on racks, all taking up space in climate-controlled rooms with teams of database administrators overseeing operations 24x7. Cloud database management, by contrast, is at the heart of next-generation digital infrastructure. Businesses are processing workloads as never before and cloud database management is what allows them to do this while scaling down maintenance and increasing business agility.

Here we go again. Your database is slow, users are experiencing lag, and your application is crawling. Sound familiar? Performance issues tend to creep up on even the best-tuned databases. Slow response times are usually the first indicator that something's not quite right, which puts you in on the back foot straight away.

A misconfigured server belonging to Indian company NetcoreCloud exposed 40 billion records and 13.4TB of data, revealing sensitive…

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Cyber criminals amplified their efforts in 2020 and amassed a large volume of information to sell on the dark web. Right now, the dark web shows many MySQL databases for sale, with each one fetching roughly $550. More than 85,000 MySQL databases have been compromised.

As ZDNet reports, “Hackers have been breaking into MySQL databases, downloading tables, deleting the originals, and leaving ransom notes behind, telling server owners to contact the attackers to get their data back.”

Initially, the server owners were able to contact the attackers. However, as the attackers expanded their operations, they eventually grew to automate responses for data requests. Automation is becoming as popular with hackers as it is with everyone else.

How can victims retrieve the stolen MySQL data?

Victims must access the hackers’ website, enter a unique ID embedded within the ransom note, and follow the instructions presented on the screen.

Unless victims pay in Bitcoin within a nine-day window of time, their data will be released for sale on the dark web.

Researchers contend that the entire process in these instances -from intrusion to auction- is likely automated. Each victim appears to have a near identical set of experiences.

How can organizations deal with the fallout from these attacks?

Victims or forensics teams can report the Bitcoin addresses utilized within the ransom demands on BitcoinAbuse.com.

In addition, ensure that your organization has a strong cyber security strategy and an incident response plan in place.

For more on this story, visit ZDNet.com.

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