cyberattacks

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Academic Biomedical Research Community Should Take Action to Build Resilience to Disasters

Press Release | The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine | August 10, 2017

The academic biomedical research community should improve its ability to mitigate and recover from the impacts of disasters, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The consequences of recent disasters, from hurricanes to cyberattacks, have shown that the investments of the U.S. federal government and other research sponsors -- which total about $27 billion annually -- are not uniformly secure. The report recommends 10 steps that academic research institutions, researchers, and research sponsors should take to bolster the resilience of academic biomedical research.

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Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich

Evan Osnos | The New Yorker | January 30, 2017

Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently...

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FDA Tells Hospitals to Ditch IV Pumps That Can Be Hacked Remotely

Jessica Conditt | engadget | July 31, 2015

The Food and Drug Administration "strongly encourages" hospitals to stop using Hospira's Symbiq Infusion System, because it's vulnerable to cyberattacks that would allow a third party to remotely control dosages delivered via the computerized pumps. Unauthorized users are able to access the Symbiq system through connected hospital networks, according to the FDA and the Department of Homeland Security's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team...

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Hackers Are Coming for Your Healthcare Records -- Here’s Why

Lucas Mearian | Computer World | June 30, 2016

Data stolen from a bank quickly becomes useless once the breach is discovered and passcodes are changed. But data from the healthcare industry, which includes both personal identities and medical histories, can live a lifetime. Cyberattacks will cost hospitals more than $305 billion over the next five years and one in 13 patients will have their data compromised by a hack, according to industry consultancy Accenture. And a study by the Brookings Institution predicts that one in four data breaches this year will hit the healthcare industry...

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Healthcare is Now Top Industry for Cyberattacks, New Research Shows

Bill Siwicki | Healthcare Finance | April 20, 2016

Five of the eight largest healthcare security breaches that occurred since the beginning of 2010 – those with more than 1 million records reportedly compromised – took place during the first six months of 2015, according to IBM X-Force's "2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index." And in 2015 overall, more than 100 million healthcare records reportedly were compromised, the report said...

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Healthcare Top Target for Cyberattacks in 2017, Experian Predicts

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | December 1, 2016

Global information services company Experian has released its 2017 data breach industry forecast, and the news is sobering. Among the report's top five predictions? "Healthcare organizations will be the most targeted sector, with new sophisticated attacks emerging." Experian sees healthcare as particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks because medical identity theft remains so lucrative and relatively easy for hackers to exploit – and they continue to find markets for reselling patient data...

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HealthCare.gov Security Gaps Identified In Contractor Documents

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | December 17, 2013

A congressional watchdog investigating the troubled launch of the Obama administration’s online health insurance marketplace HealthCare.gov released a handful of contractors’ statements on Tuesday showing they were concerned about security vulnerabilities before and soon after the site launched. Read More »

How The NSA Undermines Cybersecurity

Brendan Sasso | Nextgov.com | April 30, 2014

...Officials have warned for years that a sophisticated cyberattack could cripple critical infrastructure or allow thieves to make off with the financial information of millions of Americans. President Obama pushed Congress to enact cybersecurity legislation, and when it didn’t, he issued his own executive order in 2013...

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Industry Needs To Step Up To Protect The Power Grid From Cyber Attack

Aliya Sternstein | Nextgov | February 28, 2014

Energy companies should create a new industry-led body to deflect cyber threats to the electric grid -- from large generators to local distribution utilities, according to a new report co-authored by Ret. Gen. Michael Hayden, former CIA and National Security Agency director.

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Installing Solar to Combat National Security Risks in the Power Grid

Press Release | Michigan Technological University | May 8, 2017

Vulnerabilities in the power grid are one of the most prevalent national security threats. The technical community has called for building up the resiliency of the grid using distributed energy and microgrids for stabilization. Power production from multiple sources increases the difficulty of triggering cascading blackouts, and following an attack or natural disaster, microgrids can provide localized energy security...

N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers

David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker | New York Times | January 14, 2014

The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks. Read More »

Obama Lets NSA. Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials Say

David E. Sanger | The New York Times | April 12, 2014

Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.  But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.

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Possible Belarus Connection Prompts Probe Of Healthcare.gov

Jaikumar Vijayan | Computerworld | February 5, 2014

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched a security probe of Healthcare.gov after a U.S. intelligence unit last week warned that portions of the Affordable Care Act website was built by software developers linked to the Belarus government. Read More »

Relentless Cyber Attacks Pressure Hospital Operations

Press Release | Fitch Ratings | July 22, 2021

Ever-increasing cyberattacks on the US public healthcare sector will place material revenue and expense pressures on not-for-profit (NFP) hospitals and health systems, Fitch Ratings says. The healthcare sector has seen a historic increase in the number and severity of cyber assaults over the past 18 months. The sector is viewed as a target-rich environment due to the large amount of sensitive data that healthcare entities maintain for patient care and operations.

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Security: Healthcare's Fixer-Upper

Erin McCann | Healthcare IT News | June 4, 2014

The alarming state of affairs, how the industry's slack security is bad for business and what some are doing to step it up...

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