Latest cyberattack strucks significant organizations worldwide

A latest cyberattack similar to WannaCry is spreading from the region of Europe to the U.S., hitting port operators in the New York and Rotterdam, disrupting government systems in Kiev, and disabling operations at companies involving Rosneft PJSC and advertiser WPP Plc.

More than eighty companies in the Russia and Ukraine were previously affected by the Petya virus that disabled computers Tuesday and told users to pay $300 in cryptocurrency to unlock them, in accordance with the Moscow-based cybersecurity company Group-IB. Telecommunications operators and retailers were also impacted and the virus is spreading in a similar way to the WannaCry attack in May, it said.

Rob Wainwright, executive director at Europol, said the agency is "urgently responding" to reports of the latest cyberattack. In a separate statement, Europol said it’s in talks with "member states and key industry partners to develop the complete nature of this attack at this time."

Kremlin-controlled Rosneft, Russia’s greatest crude producer, claimed in a statement that it avoided “serious consequences” from the “hacker attack” by switching to “a backup system for managing production processes.”

U.K. media company WPP Plc.’s website is down, and workers have been told to turn off their computers and not use WiFi, in accordance with a person familiar with the matter. Sea Containers, the London building that houses WPP and agencies including Ogilvy & Mather, has been shut down, another person said. “IT systems in various WPP companies have been affected,” the company claimed in emailed statement.

Global Latest Cyberattack

The hack has rapidly spread from Russia and the Ukraine, through Europe and into the U.S. A.P. Moller-Maersk, operator of the world’s largest container line, said its customers cannot use online booking tools and its internal systems are down. The attack is affecting several sites and units, which involve a major port operator and an oil and gas producer, spokeswoman Concepcion Boo Arias said by phone.

APM Terminals, owned by Maersk, are experiencing system problems at multiple terminals, involving the Port of New York and New Jersey, the greatest port on the U.S. East Coast, and Rotterdam in The Netherlands, Europe’s largest harbor.

Cie de Saint-Gobain, a French manufacturer, said its systems had also been infected, though a spokeswoman refused to elaborate, while Mondelez International Inc. claimed was also experiencing a global IT outage and was searching into the cause. Merck & Co. Inc., based in Kenilworth, New Jersey, has also reported that its computer network was compromised due to the hack.

WannaCry Warnings

The strikes follow the global ransomware assault including the WannaCry virus that affected hundreds of thousands of computers in more than 150 countries as extortionists claimed $300 in bitcoin from victims. Ransomware attacks have been soaring and the number of such tragedies increased by 50 percent in the year of 2016, according to Verizon Communications Inc.

Analysts at Symantec Corp., have said the new virus, called Petya, uses an exploit called EternalBlue to spread, much like WannaCry. EternalBlue works on vulnerabilities in Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.

The latest virus has a fake Microsoft digital signature appended to it and the attack is spreading to several countries, Costin Raiu, director of the global research and analysis team at Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, said on Twitter.

The latest cyberattack has hit Ukraine particularly hard. The intrusion is “the greatest in Ukraine’s history,” Anton Gerashchenko, an aide to the Interior Ministry, wrote on Facebook. The goal was “the destabilization of the economic situation and in the civic consciousness of Ukraine,” though it was “disguised as an extortion attempt,” he claimed.

Kyivenergo, a Ukrainian utility, switched off all computers after the hack, while another power company, Ukrenergo, was also impacted, though “not seriously,” the Interfax news service reported.

Ukrainian delivery network Nova Poshta halted service to clients after its network was infected, the company claimed on Facebook. Ukraine’s Central Bank warned on its website that various banks had been targeted by hackers.

 

Data Breaches: Clinician sharing of data a key reason for breaches

An analysis of 5 years of data from a database of huge data breaches impacting nearly 500 individuals finds that in the year of 2016 the reporting of such breaches exceeded 300 for the 1st time.

The analysis of the database, operated by the Office for Civil Rights for the Department of Health and Human Services, comes from Safetica North America. It discovered that well-intended clinicians sharing data results in a 10% breach growth rate yearly; and this sharing is the major driver of data breaches, claims Luke Walling, general manager at Safetica, a data loss prevention vendor operating in the region of Europe for 7 years that started operations in the U.S. in the month of September.

When the 10% of well-intended sharing is combined with other tragedies of unauthorized access and disclosure, that category accounted for 41.5% of data breaches during the year of 2016, compared with 25% in the year of 2014. Hacking accounted for almost 32% this year, compared with 14% of tragedies in the year of 2014. Other breach rates in 2016 involved theft (19%), loss (5.4%) and inaccurate disposal (2.3%).

“Workers or associates accessing and sharing data they should not—or revealing it to people they should not—was the single greatest breach factor this year,” in accordance to the analysis.

As 2016 draws to a close, 15.2 million records have been compromised. That is is a lot, but the 2015 number was 113.3 million following a series of very huge attacks that involved the Anthem hack that accounted for 70% of all breaches in the year of 2015.

Medical records’ theft fell to its lowest level this year since the year of 2013, with better security education and protection of documents, as well as better devices to police networks and employee actions, claims Walling.

Hacking in the year of 2017 could really take a dip as healthcare agencies get better at controlling what they can control, and security technology and best practices also sustain to improve, Walling assumes. Although, it is wise not to get complacent, he warns. “The issue with phishing is it still works. It is immensely tough for anyone to distinguish between real and malware emails, so you have to make certain the data cannot leave the agency.”

That leads to another issue—permitting the flow of data without affecting how individuals do their jobs. Encryption obviously is a powerful protector of data, but users do not need to have to consciously decrypt and encrypt data.

Tools are available that develop rules for how files move throughout a network. A rule, for example, could auto-encrypt a file, decrypt the file to use it, and then re-encrypt it, Walling claims. “These rules make files accessible and the encryption and decryption procedures are invisible to the consumer”.

 

Stop refusing migrants their fundamental right to healthcare, claims doctor

European countries must stop rejecting migrants their fundamental right to healthcare, discusses a doctor in The BMJ today.

Europe is experiencing the greatest mass migration of people since the Second World War, in accordance to estimates from the Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Jonathan Clarke, a doctor and Kennedy Scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, says that "many persons think that entire migrants to Europe have meaningful access to healthcare, but the truth is different."

Initially this year, Dr Clarke visited 6 clinics run by the charity Médecins du monde (MdM), also called as Doctors of the World, across Europe as part of his research project. The charity has been caring for Syrian migrants and refugees since the early days of the dispute in the Syria.

He claims two thirds of the 15,648 migrants attending clinics run by MdM throughout Europe previous year had no access to healthcare. And in the UK, four in five (1154 of 1395) migrants had been not able to access a GP.

Atlantic Healthcare closes $24M round and acquires Salix founder as latest CSA

Atlantic Healthcare has raised $24 million in its new financing with the founders of Salix Pharmaceuticals and Clinigen Group stumping up much of the cash.

The money will assist the U.K.-headquartered firm secure enough funds to complete its Phase 3 trial of alicaforsen in pouchitis, and then file for regulatory approval in the state of North America and Europe from next year.

Dr. Lorin Johnson, scientific founder of NC-based GI specialist Salix, has also joined the board of Atlantic while also taking on an executive role as the firm's new chief scientific adviser.

Johnson worked at Salix until its multi-billion dollar buyout in the month of April previous year by Canada's embattled Valeant. Prior to Salix, Johnson was chief scientist at California Biotechnology.

Like ulcerative colitis (UC), pouchitis is a progressive disease marked by inflammation, ulceration, increasingly uncontrolled, frequent and urgent emptying of the bowel and is a common complication of ileal pouch surgery. Nearly 100,000 persons are considered to have it in the U.S. with similar numbers affected in Europe.

Health care data is key to better sufferer results

Healthcare is believed to be one of the greatest portions of the U.S. economy, depicting a $2.8 trillion market (PDF), in accordance to PwC. It is also a sector rife with problems, with the price of care, drugs, and insurance generally increasing above the cost of inflation per year. As politicians on the right and the left debate the merits of the Affordable Care Act, what to do about Medicare, or whether we should shift to a single payer model as in the country of Europe and Canada, 1 thing is clear: Health care in the U.S. requires a lot of fixing, and employing innovative technology effectively can be part of the solution.

In a panel on health care APIs this week, experts and entrepreneurs in health data convened to explain the state of building interoperable API based solutions for approaching health records. The accessibility of health care records across contributors and sufferers has long been a sore point.