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Submission + - A Quarter of Healthcare Orgs Say Ransomware Attacks Result in Patient Deaths (esecurityplanet.com)

storagedude writes: Nearly a quarter of healthcare organizations hit by ransomware attacks experienced an increase in patient mortality, according to a new study from Ponemon Institute and Proofpoint.

The report, “Cyber Insecurity in Healthcare: The Cost and Impact on Patient Safety and Care,” surveyed 641 healthcare IT and security practitioners and found that the most common consequences of cyberattacks are delayed procedures and tests, resulting in poor patient outcomes for 57% of the healthcare providers, followed by increased complications from medical procedures. The type of attack most likely to have a negative impact on patient care is ransomware, leading to procedure or test delays in 64% of the organizations and longer patient stays for 59% of them.

The Ponemon report depends on the accuracy of self-reporting and thus doesn't have the weight of, say, an epidemiological study that looks at hospital mortality baseline data before and after an attack, but the data is similar to what Ponemon has found in the past and there have been a number of reports of patient deaths and other complications from ransomware attacks.

The new report found that 89% of the surveyed organizations have experienced an average of 43 attacks in the past year. The most common types of attacks were cloud compromise, ransomware, supply chain, and business email compromise (BEC)/spoofing/phishing.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a top concern for survey participants. Healthcare organizations have an average of more than 26,000 network-connected devices, yet only 51% of the surveyed organizations include them in their cybersecurity strategy.

Healthcare organizations are better at cloud security, with 63% taking steps to prepare for and respond to cloud compromise attacks, and 62% have taken steps to prevent and respond to ransomware — but that still leaves nearly 40% of healthcare organizations more vulnerable than they should be.

Preparedness is even worse for supply chain attacks and BEC, with only 44% and 48% having a documented response to those attacks, respectively.

The high costs of healthcare cyberattacks — an average of $4.4 million — mean that healthcare cybersecurity tools likely have a high ROI, even though roughly half of the survey respondents say they lack sufficient staffing and in-house expertise.

Submission + - SPAM: Researchers 3-D print biomedical parts with supersonic speed

schwit1 writes: Forget glue, screws, heat or other traditional bonding methods. A Cornell University-led collaboration has developed a 3-D printing technique that creates cellular metallic materials by smashing together powder particles at supersonic speed.

This form of technology, known as "cold spray," results in mechanically robust, porous structures that are 40% stronger than similar materials made with conventional manufacturing processes. The structures' small size and porosity make them particularly well-suited for building biomedical components, like replacement joints.

The team's paper, "Solid-State Additive Manufacturing of Porous Ti-6Al-4V by Supersonic Impact," published Nov. 9 in Applied Materials Today.

"We only focused on titanium alloys and biomedical applications, but the applicability of this process could be beyond that," Moridi said. "Essentially, any metallic material that can endure plastic deformation could benefit from this process. And it opens up a lot of opportunities for larger-scale industrial applications, like construction, transportation and energy."

Link to Original Source

Comment Re:WHO CARES ABOUT REDHAT ??? (Score 1) 384

Look for that to change. Red Hat told us a year ago that Xen was dead and being phased out. If Oracle wishes to continue to use RHEL code with tweaks they will be moving to KVM. I doubt they want to go through the bother of messing with Xen if it's removed in RHEL.

Oracle has had their own independent Xen implementation that they ship as Oracle VM.
And Sun's Xen uses Solaris as the dom0.
No Red Hat Xen.

Comment Scratch and Alice (Score 1) 799

Go with a visual programming language -- where they can see "fun" results right away, and that's age appropriate. What I just did with my 2 cousins (14 and 16 year old girls):

That's a *much* better way to start them off. It's equivalent to BASIC on an Apple II really, but even more fun.
Then you can start them off on something like a Facebook App, and then web pages with Perl/Javascript/HTML.

Comment Re:IBM FireFox? (Score 4, Interesting) 200

The major Linux distributions, like Red Hat, would probably chip in. Part of the reason that Linux has any desktop market share at all is because Firefox runs on it, and many major sites support it. If people couldn't access their banking sites, YouTube, etc. with their Linux browser, they would replace their Linux desktop with Windows. Or, in the case of netbooks, buy the Windows version instead of the Linux one.

Censorship

IWF Backs Down On Wiki Censorship 226

jonbryce writes "The Internet Watch Foundation, guardians of the Great Firewall of Britain, have stopped censoring Wikipedia for hosting what they considered to be a child porn image. They had previously threatened to block Amazon for hosting the same image." Here is the IWF's statement, which credits the Streisand Effect for opening their eyes: "...in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. ... IWF's overriding objective is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."

Comment Re:Stop calling Apple products intuitive (Score 5, Insightful) 454

A better term might be "discoverable". If you can play with it and figure out what it does without consulting the manual or asking someone else, then it has high "discover-ability". Combine that with "consistent": knowledge of one part of the system helps you to use other parts of the system that you haven't tried yet. Those terms together get at what many people mean when they say "intuitive"

From the time I've spent playing with demo iPhones and Touches the interface was pretty easy to understand. When you turn the phone sideways, it goes into landscape mode and it pretty much does that everywhere, so it is consistent. It is also consistent with what I would expect in the real world; if I'm orienting the screen sideways, I probably want to use it so the long edge is the top now. You can also learn that pretty easily just by trying it, so it is also discoverable. When the iPhone breaks consistency, like the lack of a landscape keyboard in some apps, people complain, which indicates that consistent behavior is part of what we think of as "intuitive".

Zooming in and out works by pinching and pulling, which isn't very discoverable, but it makes sense a certain amount of real-world logical sense ( I'm stretching a photo to make it bigger, squishing it to make it smaller). Once you learn it, you can try that same action in other places and it will do pretty much what you expect (discoverable and consistent). Of course, you can get away with some of those things on a media player because many operations aren't really destructive; you can play with the device to see how it works. If stretching a word processing document ripped it in half and deleted it, that would probably be a different story.

I've tried the Android emulator a bit, so I have some familiarity with the interface. I think I could pretty much figure out how to do most things I'd want to do with it, but it definitely has the feeling of a computer interface shrunk to fit a phone. I think it is discoverable, but from playing with it and reading the reviews, it isn't consistent, so it ultimately isn't as discoverable as the iPhone is.

The iPhone software, on the other hand, feels more like it is purpose-built for the phone; like a part of the device as opposed to running on it. Even the main screen evokes a keypad layout like a touch tone phone rather than the desktop metaphor that Android shoehorns in.

Ultimately, I think that is Android's major challenge. It can't easily become part of a device out of the box because it could run on a range of hardware, while the iPhone software only has to support the iPhone and can blend smoothly with the hardware experience. This is in some ways more important than the relationship of Windows and OS X to their various hardware since we have certain expectations about how a phone should perform that PC's don't have. There is potential for Android to become more discoverable and consistent; personally I'm going to wait for the next Android phone to see if it has improved.

Data Storage

Major Breakthrough In Spintronics Research 106

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "Spintronics is the field of research into developing devices that rely on electron spin rather than electron charge to carry information. A major advance has been made by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), where they have for the first time generated, modulated, and electrically detected a pure spin current in silicon. Progress in this field is expected to lead to devices which provide higher performance with lower power consumption and heat dissipation. Basic research efforts at NRL and elsewhere have shown that spin angular momentum, another fundamental property of the electron, can be used to store and process information in metal and semiconductor based devices. The article abstract is available from Applied Physics Letters."
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Why do games still have levels? (blogspot.com) 1

a.d.venturer writes: Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal, Team Fortress 2), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Nethack, Angband)? Why do games still have levels?
Microsoft

Submission + - MS dirty tricks archive trickles back to life

networkBoy writes: The register is carrying a blurb about the dirty tricks of microsoft archive going off-line, and being pulled from archive.org. It appears that several individuals have the pieces to the puzzle and are looking for hosting sources. Maybe the /. community can help here? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/21/microsoft_ archive_not_lost/

The 3,000 document archive from the Comes antitrust trial, which disappeared from the web abruptly when Microsoft settled the case last week, is beginning to trickle back into view. A week ago the site was placed under password protection, Microsoft withdrew its own account of events, and so-called internet "archive" archive.org apparently also pulled its mirror.
United States

Submission + - Are we stuck with CYA homeland security?

netbuzz writes: "Security expert Bruce Schneier suggests this morning that "there might not be a solution" to our post-9/11 penchant for making domestic anti-terrorism decisions based on the basic human desire to cover one's backside. He might be right. But shouldn't we at least try to figure out a better way? For example, wouldn't "Commonsense Homeland Security" be a winning political banner, not a risky one? Aren't we sick and tired of taking our shoes off at the airport?

http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1174 6"
Linux Business

Submission + - Which Embedded Linux Distribution?

Abhikhurana writes: I work for a company which designs a variety of video surveillance devices (such as MPEG4 video servers). Traditionally, these products have been based on proprietory OSs such as Nucleus and VxWorks. Now we are redesigning a few of our products and I am trying to convince my company to go down the Linux route. Understandably, our management is quite sceptical about that and so I was asked by our CTO to recommend a few RTOSs which have mature Networking stacks and which work well on ARM platform. I know that there are many embedded linux based distributions out there. There are commerical ones such as Montavista, LynuxWorks, free ones such as uclinux, muLinux and some Linux like distros such as Ecos, but which is the most stable and best community supported embedded Linux distribution out there?

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