REDMOND, Wash. — Dec. 10, 2009 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that it intends to acquire Sentillion Inc., a privately held company specializing in software for the healthcare industry.

Microsoft acquire IDM solutions vendor Sentillion, it seems more from a healthcare perspective than identity management.

Classified as visionaries within user provisioning by Gartner, Sentillion have a good array of SSO and IdM expertise which Microsoft could amalgamate with their own Forefront Identity Manager.

It wont be easy; Sentillion is specifically geared towards the healthcare sector so could be missing a few essential pieces to fit snugly and Forefront also has a provisioning solutions as does Sentillion in the form of ProVision. But to leverage only Sentilion’s healthcare presence, at a time when US healthcare is going through a revolution, and nothing else would be a travesty.

Only time will tell.

HMRC have recently warned of another phishing scam which has surfaced telling people to review their fraudulent tax claims. For most people seeing the words Tax and Fraudulent in the same sentence can immediately have them in a panic:

As usual with phishing scams, the address looks genuine but it’s spoofed. The header information suggests that the senders originate from Japan and the URL actually points to online.hmrc.gov.uk.neaazax.cn – don’t remember the Inland Revenue being moved to China.

The email links to a fake HMRC website and asks that you download and review a tax statement document. The website then opens an executable file on your machine which compromises the host machine. As usual with these types of social engineering you should listen to common sense before clicking any links on unsolicited email. You can forward recieved spam on to phishing@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk for this particular scam and there are many references out there which give help and advice related to phishing and social engineering.