Tag Archives: coronavirus

Cyber Security

Remote workers need to improve security measures

 

Security firm Avast provides tips on how people can work safely from their homes during an epidemic.

Technological support and security measures are one of the ways organizations and their employees can protect their jobs when they start working remotely during the COVID-19 outbreak. While digital security firm Avast has also been working to help more companies protect their employees from coronavirus worldwide, they have made some suggestions on how people can work safely from their homes during the epidemic.

Remote workers need to improve security measures

Avast CISO shares some information about how employees can protect their devices from virtual viruses while protecting themselves from physical coronaviruses:

Corporate security measures

According to an Avast survey, an average of 49.75% of people worldwide said they did not receive the technological support or expertise they needed from their employers while working from home or in a public place. Avast CISO says that companies that are preparing to send the workforce home need to provide the support they need to work remotely, and take the following steps:

Make sure employees use pre-approved laptops and smartphones to access corporate material, including emails, tools and documents. Business-grade security solutions must be installed on these devices and checked, if any, by the company’s IT department.
Equip employees with a phone number list so they can reach IT teams or other responsible people when they have IT issues.
Inform employees about hardware, software and services that are not published by the company but can help you share your files with colleagues in special situations.

Set basic rules for those who work with personal hardware, such as printers, while working from home.
Provide employees with VPN connections that they can use to protect their communications.
Require two-factor authentication wherever possible to add an extra layer of protection to the accounts.
Instead of ensuring that employees have access to the entire company network, make sure they have limited access rights and can only connect to the services they need for their specific tasks.

Measures that employees can take

According to the Avast CISO, there are basic measures that remote workers can take to strengthen the security of their home networks, which will make working from home safer.

Employees must log in to their router’s administrative interface to change the device’s login credentials, and also change their Wi-Fi passwords with a unique and strong password of at least 16 characters.

According to the Avast survey, 37.1% of global participants do not know that they have a web management interface where they can log in to view and change their router’s settings.

Avast recommends that users check whether port forwarding and UPnP are enabled in their router settings and disable them if they are not used intentionally.

Networks are only as secure as their weakest connections, so it’s important to make sure all devices connected to the network are secure, as there may be potential gateways for cybercriminals to access other devices connected to the home network.

Another point is that employees should look for coronavirus-related phishing emails, including spear phishing emails. These emails may appear to come from the company and may include attachments, links, or a request. It is important that users verify the sender’s e-mail address before communicating any attachment, link or request, or contact the sender through a different channel to confirm that the message was sent from them.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence, human brain and corona virus

The last 48 hours of 2019 were a critical moment in which the scope of the new virus was understood.

On December 30, the doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital Li Wenliang warned his friends about the virus on a social network, an attitude for which he was interrogated for

Did artificial intelligence knockdown the human brain by predicting a severe outbreak of coronavirus in China ?

But while humans perhaps did not do it with the same speed, they compensated for this with certain attitudes.

Early detection of an outbreak can help save lives.

At the end of 2019, a Boston artificial intelligence (AI) system issued the first global alert about an outbreak of a virus in China.

But it was human intelligence that realized the magnitude of the outbreak and sought answers from the medical community.

What’s more, mere mortals issued a similar alert just half an hour later than AI systems.

For now, AI disease alert systems seem more like car alarms: They make a noise about anything and are sometimes ignored.

A network of medical experts and detectives must analyze more material to get an accurate idea of what happened.

It is hard to say what impact the AI systems of the future can have, fueled by increasingly large databases, in terms of disease outbreaks.

The first public alert outside China about the novel coronavirus arrived on December 30, from the automated HealthMap system at Boston Children’s Hospital.

At 11.12 p.m., HealthMa issued an alert about unidentified pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan .

The system, which analyzes online news and social media reports, gave its alert a category of three on a scale of five.

It took HealthMap researchers several days to realize the severity of the outbreak.

Four hours before the HealthMap alert, the New York epidemiologist Marjorie Pollack had started working on her own alert, motivated by a personal email she had received shortly before.

“This is being distributed through the internet here,” wrote his contact, who reprinted a post on a Pincong internet forum.

The post spoke of a warning from the body that manages health in Wuhan and said: Unexplained pneumonia?

Pollack, who is deputy director of the Program for the Monitoring of New Diseases, run by volunteers and is known as ProMed, promptly mobilized a team to analyze the matter.

A more detailed ProMed report circulated about 30 minutes after the brief HealthMap alert.

Emergency detection systems that analyze social networks, news on the internet and government reports for signs of infectious disease outbreaks help inform international agencies such as the World Health Organization

, allowing experts take the bull by the antlers early without tripping over bureaucratic and language obstacles.

Some systems, including ProMed, take advantage of the human experience.

And more than competing with each other, they often complement each other, as is the case with HealthMap and ProMed.

Li, who died on February 7 following the virus, told The New York Times that it would have been better if the authorities offered information about the epidemic before.

“They should be more open and transparent,” he said.

The effectiveness of the algorithms depends on the information they collect, said Nita Madhav, CEO of the San Francisco Metabiota disease monitoring company.

Madhav said that inconsistencies in the way each agency distributes medical information can affect algorithms and that to avoid confusion there is almost always a human being involved in the

Scientists are using databases to determine possible disease transmission routes.

The last 48 hours of 2019 were a critical moment in which the scope of the new virus was understood.

On December 30, the doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital Li Wenliang warned his friends about the virus on a social network, an attitude for which he was interrogated for

In early January, Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease doctor and researcher at Toronto General Hospital, analyzed commercial flight information with Kamran Khan, founder of BlueDot, to see which cities outside

But by then 5 million people had escaped from the city, the mayor admitted.

“We showed that the most common destinations were Thailand, Japan and Hong Kong,” Bogoch said.

“It turns out that a few days later we started seeing cases in those places.”

Robotics

The Penaut robot which takes food to patients isolated by the Corona virus

Penaut robot assists a group of people in quarantine at a Hangzhou hotel

The Penaut robot , from the Keenon company , is responsible for bringing food to isolated patients who suffering with Corona Virus in quarantine at a hotel in Hangzhou , China .

A group of travelers on a flight with passengers affected by the coronavirus are in quarantine at a Hangzhou hotel, where a nurse robot is responsible for carrying food while they are under observation .

Peanut, developed by the Keenon company, warns of its arrival as it moves through the halls, so that people open the door and leave just enough to pick up the trays it carries.

The robot is an autonomous assistance model, which has sensors and radars that, together with machine learning technology, allow it to be located in the environment and move safely around it.

Who knows we may get see the Robots which operate critical surgeries in near future.