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Hospitals Should Brace For Surge In Ransomware Attacks
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U.S. hospitals should brace for a surge in “ransomware” attacks by cyber criminals who take computer networks hostage, then demand payment in return for unlocking them, a non-profit healthcare group warned on Friday.
The Health Information Trust Alliance conducted a study of some 30 mid-sized U.S. hospitals late last year and found that 52 percent of them were infected with malicious software, HITRUST Chief Executive Daniel Nutkis told Reuters.
The most common type of malware was ransomware, Nutkis said, which was present in 35 percent of the hospitals included in the study of network traffic conducted by security software maker Trend Micro Inc.
Ransomware is malicious software that locks up data in computers and leaves messages demanding payment to recover the data. Last month, Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles paid a ransom of $17,000 to regain access to its systems.
This week, an attack on MedStar Health forced the largest healthcare provider in Washington, D.C., to shut down much of its computer network. The Baltimore Sun reported a ransom of $18,500 was sought. MedStar declined to comment.
HITRUST said it expects such attacks to become more frequent because ransomware has turned into a profitable business for cyber criminals.
The results of the study, which HITRUST has yet to share with the public, demonstrate that hackers have moved away from focusing on stealing patient data, Nutkis said.
“If stuff isn’t working, they move on. If stuff is working, they keep doing it,” said Nutkis. “Organizations that are paying have considered their options, and unfortunately they don’t have a lot of options.”
Extortion has become more popular with cyber criminals because it is seen as a way to generate fast money, said Larry Whiteside, a healthcare expert with cyber security firm Optiv.
Stealing healthcare data is far more labor intensive, requiring attackers to keep their presence in a victim’s network undetected for months as they steal data, then they need to find buyers, he added.
“With ransomware I’m going to get paid immediately,” Whiteside said.
Courtesy- http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/hospitals-should-brace-for-surge-in-ransomware-attacks.html
U.S. LTE Speeds Drop
October 5, 2015 by admin
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The U.S. has dropped to No. 55 in LTE performance as speeds rise rapidly in countries that have lept ahead some early adopters of the popular cellular system.
The average download speed on U.S. 4G networks inched up to 10Mbps (bits per second) in the June-August quarter, according to research company OpenSignal. That was an improvement from 9Mbps in the previous quarter, but the country’s global ranking fell from 43rd as users in other countries made much larger gains.
The U.S. was one of the first countries with commercial LTE service when Verizon Wireless launched its network in late 2010. But other countries that adopted the system later started with better technology, and some have secured more frequencies or rolled out enhancements that U.S. carriers haven’t embraced as much, OpenSignal said.
New Zealand scored the highest average speed in the quarter with 36Mbps, coming up from nowhere in the rankings. But perennial standouts like South Korea and Singapore kept getting faster, too. The average LTE speed in Korea is now 29Mbps (up by 4Mbps), and in Singapore it’s 33Mbps, up by 5Mbps.
OpenSignal collects data on cellular performance through a free app that mobile subscribers can use to measure the speed they’re getting and find faster networks. The results announced Wednesday are based on readings from more than 300,000 users worldwide, the company said.
Countries like Hungary, the Dominican Republic and Morocco beat the U.S. in average LTE speed, but they aren’t necessarily smartphone paradises. Mobile users in America can use LTE more of the time, for example, because their carrier’s networks are built out. Subscribers in the U.S. are on LTE 78 percent of the time, on average, making the country No. 10 for what OpenSignal calls “time coverage.” Moroccan LTE may be fast, but 49 percent of the time, users there don’t get it, for example.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/u-s-falls-to-55th-place-worldwide-for-lte-speeds.html
Brits Investigate Facebook
July 15, 2014 by admin
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The British data watchdog is looking into whether Facebook Inc violated data-protection laws when it gave permission to researchers to conduct a psychological experiment on its users.
A Facebook spokesman acknowledged that the experiment on nearly 700,000 unwitting users in 2012 had upset users and said the company would change the way it handled research in future.
The study, to find if Facebook could alter the emotional state of users and prompt them to post either more positive or negative content, has caused a furor on social media, including Facebook itself.
“We’re aware of this issue and will be speaking to Facebook, as well as liaising with the Irish data protection authority, to learn more about the circumstances,” the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) spokesman Greg Jones said in an email.
Jones said it was too early to tell exactly what part of the law Facebook may have infringed. The company’s European headquarters is in Ireland.
The Commissioner’s Office monitors how personal data is used and has the power to force organizations to change their policies and can levy fines of up to 500,000 pounds ($839,500).
Facebook said it would work with regulators and was changing the way it handled such cases.
“It’s clear that people were upset by this study and we take responsibility for it,” Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld said in an email.
“The study was done with appropriate protections for people’s information and we are happy to answer any questions regulators may have.”
IT Dissatisfaction Growing
Companies want to reduce spending on IT operations and infrastructure and shift resources to revenue-producing areas, according to two new studies. But businesses leaders and IT executives are also registering higher levels of dissatisfaction with IT as more demands are placed on technology.
The reports, by the Hackett Group and McKinsey & Co., both agree that business executives want IT to do more to improve the bottom line while companies spend less on infrastructure in the process.
The bad news for people who work in IT operations is that large businesses expect to cut IT staff positions by about 2% this year, thanks to automation and outsourcing, according the Hackett’s survey of 160 businesses with revenues above $1 billion.
One path to improved automation will likely be through adoption of software-defined infrastructures, something Bank of America plans to do.
IT budgets will grow by 1.7% this year as IT pivots, increasingly, from a service-providing operation to a revenue-generating one, the Hackett Group said in its study.
IT managers are being told that “you’ve got to grow the business, not just run the business,” said Mark Peacock, an IT transformation practice leader and principal at Hackett.
McKinsey & Co., in its online survey of more than 800 executives — with 345 having a technology focus — also found that executives want less of their budgets to go to infrastructure so more resources can be shifted to analytics and innovation.
The McKinsey survey found that business executives are less likely to say now that IT performs effectively, compared to their views two years ago.
“The IT executives are even more negative,” wrote McKinsey, with only 13% of them saying their IT organizations “are completely or very effective at introducing new technologies faster or more effectively than competitors.” That percentage was down from 22% in 2012.
The negative results “likely reflect the overall rising expectations for corporate IT,” wrote McKinsey.
When asked how to fix IT shortcomings, respondents cited improved business accountability, more funds for priority projects and a higher the level of IT talent, the report said.
The Hackett Group survey didn’t report on dissatisfaction, but it did find that the top goal for IT organizations this year is “to strengthen partnership and goal alignment between IT and the business.”
Scientist Develop Anti-Faking PC
Scientists have developed a computer system with sophisticated pattern recognition abilities that performed more impressively than humans in differentiating between people experiencing genuine pain and people who were just pretending.
In a study published in the journal Current Biology, human subjects did no better than chance – about 50 percent – in correctly judging if a person was feigning pain after seeing videos in which some people were and some were not.
The computer was right 85 percent of the time. Why? The researchers say its pattern-recognition abilities successfully spotted distinctive aspects of facial expressions, particularly involving mouth movements, that people generally missed.
“We all know that computers are good at logic processes and they’ve long out-performed humans on things like playing chess,” said Marian Bartlett of the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California-San Diego, one of the researchers.
“But in perceptual processes, computers lag far behind humans and have a lot of trouble with perceptual processes that humans tend to find easy, including speech recognition and visual recognition. Here’s an example of a perceptual process that the computer is able to do better than human observers,” Bartlett said in a telephone interview.
For the experiment, 25 volunteers each recorded two videos.
In the first, each of the volunteers immersed an arm in lukewarm water for a minute and were told to try to fool an expert into thinking they were in pain. In the second, the volunteers immersed an arm in a bucket of frigid ice water for a minute, a genuinely painful experience, and were given no instructions on what to do with their facial expressions.
The researchers asked 170 other volunteers to assess which people were in real discomfort and which were faking it.
After they registered a 50 percent accuracy rate, which is no better than a coin flip, the researchers gave the volunteers training in recognizing when someone was faking pain. Even after this, the volunteers managed an accuracy rate of only 55 percent.
The computer’s vision system included a video camera that took images of a person’s facial expressions and decoded them. The computer had been programmed to recognize that one kind of facial movement combinations suggested true pain and another kind suggested faked pain.
Africa To Lead Global Bandwidth Demand
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Africa’s demand for Internet access to the rest of the world will grow by an average of 51 percent every year until 2019, ahead of all other regions, according to a forecast by research company Telegeography.
Rapid economic growth and wider Internet use will drive the increase in demand, which will be met mostly by turning on unused capacity in existing cables, according to Telegeography analyst Erik Kreifeldt. Terrestrial links are in demand partly because much of Africa still relies on satellite, which is far more expensive per bit than wired broadband, he said.
Most Internet bandwidth between continents is provided by undersea cables built and financed by groups of service providers. From Africa, most of those links go to Europe. Other carriers pay to tap into those cables and link their customers to the Internet. In some parts of Africa, running cables from coastal areas to the interior is a challenge so satellite remains the major Internet source, Kreifeldt said.
The capacity of international cables landing on African shores is just a fraction of the bandwidth available between Europe, the U.S. and Asia. After seven years of the growth that Telegeography forecasts, from 2012 through 2019, Africa will have 17.2Tbps (bits per second) of links to the outside world. That’s up from just 957Gbps in 2012 but will still be only about one-quarter of the international capacity of Latin America and less than that of Canada, according to Telegeography.
The hunger for the Internet varies among African countries. Through 2019, bandwidth demand is expected to grow fastest in Angola, at 71 percent per year; Tanzania, at 68 percent; and Gabon, at 67 percent.
Many new cables have been built to Africa and around the continent in the past several years, giving service providers excess fiber capacity that can be turned on when needed, Kreifeldt said. As that fiber gets lit up and supply rises, prices should fall for enterprises and other users in African countries, he said. However, due to relative scarcity, a given amount of bandwidth between Africa and Europe costs about 10 times as much as the same size connection between Europe and North America, he said. Africa’s bandwidth gains aren’t expected to shrink that gap.
Is The Tesla Hackable?
It’s the curse of the connected car once it’s linked to the Internet, it’s, well, on the Internet. In the case of the Tesla Model S, this means that mischievous hackers could, in theory, control some functions of the vehicle and even snoop without the owner’s knowledge.
Tesla offers Android and iPhone apps for Model S owners, which can be used to check the vehicle’s battery, track its location and status, and tweak several other settings, like climate control and the sunroof. It can also be used to unlock the doors on the Model S.
Dell senior engineer George Reese says the REST API used by Tesla to provide access for Android and iPhone apps has several fairly serious security flaws, which could offer a way in for unscrupulous hackers.
According to an article written by Reese for O’Reilly, Tesla appears to have broken from accepted best practice when designing the API for the Model S.
“It’s flawed in a way that makes no sense. Tesla ignored most conventions around API authentication and wrote their own. As much as I talk about the downsides to OAuth (a standard for authenticating consumers of REST APIs–Twitter uses it), this scenario is one that screams for its use,” he wrote.
However, Reese notes, this is merely a potential attack vector, not one that could be immediately exploited. That said, a compromised website particularly one designed to provide “value-added services” via the API to Tesla drivers could prove highly damaging.
“I can … honk their horns, flash their lights, and open and close the sunroof. While none of this is catastrophic, it can certainly be surprising and distracting while someone is driving,” Reese wrote.
Automotive hacking has been posited by experts for some time, and several presentations at this year’s Defcon detailed fairly comprehensive methods of compromising some models.