Business

  • Isolation: More countries sever trade, transportation links with Ebola-affected states

    The World Health Organization (WHO) has called on governments not to impose sweeping bans on trade and travel on Ebola-affected countries. The organization’s urgent call followed the announcement by Kenya that it was joining a growing list of countries severing all trade and transportation links to the three west African countries most affected by Ebola – Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Independently of government actions, many airlines have already stopped flying to and from the three countries. The disease has already killed at least 1,145 people in these three countries and in Nigeria.

  • Three infected Liberian health workers receive rare Ebola serum

    Three Liberian health care workers who have been infected with the Ebola virus while treating patients, have on Friday received a scarce experimental serum – Zmapp — at a hospital outside the national capital, Monrovia, the Liberian capital. This is the same serum given to two American workers, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, who contracted Ebola while working at ELWA Hospital in Monrovia. Brantly and Writebol were evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where they have been showing promising signs of recovering from the disease. Mapp Biopharmaceutical of San Diego, which provided the drug, said the “available supply of ZMapp has been exhausted.”

  • Energy companies slow to buy cyberdamage insurance

    The U.S. oil industry will spend $1.87 billion on cybersecurity defense systems by 2018, but less than 20 percent of U.S. companies overall are covered for cyberdamages. “Imagine what could happen if a large refinery or petrochemical facility’s safety monitoring systems were hijacked near an urban area, or a subsea control module was no longer able to be controlled by the people who should be controlling it,” says one expert. “As we’ve all seen from Deepwater Horizon [the 2010 BP Gulf oil spill] those risks and damages can be astronomical. It requires an immediate response.”

  • The CDC contracts Emergent BioSolutions for $18.9 million smallpox treatment

    The CDC has contracted Emergent BioSolutions for the supply of Vaccinia Immune Globulin Intravenous (VIGIV) into the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). VIGIV is a therapeutic licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of complications due to smallpox vaccination. The contract options are valued at $18.9 million over three years.

  • Ebola vaccine to be tested on humans

    Efforts to test an Ebola vaccine on humans have reached a milestone when BioProtection Systems, through its parent company, NewLink Genetics Corporation, confirmed that it is prepared to launch the first human safety trial of a vaccine, which the company licensed after it was developed by scientists at the Public Health Agency of Canada. Thevaccine replaces the genes from vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), a pathogen found in livestock, with a gene from the Ebola virus. The Ebola gene then develops a harmless protein that sits on the virus’s outer coat.

  • Containing the international spread of Ebola

    By Sanjaya Senanayake

    The West African Ebola virus outbreak is already the largest of its kind, both in terms of numbers and geography. And with the most distant parts of the world less than a day’s flight away, it isn’t too difficult to imagine Ebola virus spreading. During the SARS outbreak, both exit and entry screening strategies failed to detect many cases. The virus spread from Asia to various parts of the world, especially to Canada. But despite the limited detection rate of the airport screening process during the SARS outbreak, it was still thought to be a useful way to educate incoming travelers about what to do and where to go if they became sick.

  • Financial firms go beyond NIST's cybersecurity framework

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST) released its Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurityin February 2014. Utilities, banks, and other critical industries welcomed the guidelines, but many considered the framework to be a baseline for what was needed to continuously protect their networks from cyberattacks. Some financial firms have developed industry-based cyber policies through association such as the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center’s (FS-ISAC) Third Party Software Security Working Group. The group has been reviewing cyber policies since 2012, before the NIST guidelines were finalized.

  • All-industry cybersecurity association needed: Experts

    A new report is calling for a professional association committed to serving the cybersecurity industry. Theacknowledged the shortage of qualified cybersecurity professionals, as well as the difficulty of recruiting, training, and hiring potential candidates.Experts say that a cybersecurity association could help assess the needs of employers seeking cybersecurity professionals, establish ongoing training and development programs, and also help develop cybersecurity standards across all industries.

  • Program aiming to facilitate cyberthreat information sharing is slow to take off

    President Barack Obama’s 2013 executive orderto improve critical infrastructure cybersecurity allows DHS to expand an information-sharing program, once restricted to Pentagoncontractors, to sixteencritical infrastructure industries. The Enhanced Cybersecurity Servicesprogram transmits cyber threat indicators to selected companies so they may prepare their network protection systems to scan for those indicators. A DHS inspector general (IG) reportreleased on Monday has found that just about forty companies from three of the sixteen industries — energy, communications services, and defense — are part of the program. Moreover, only two ISPs are authorized to receive the indicators.

  • Two major security vulnerabilities found in majority of world’s smartphones

    Researchers have uncovered two major vulnerabilities in smart phones from manufacturers including Apple, Google Android, and Blackberry, among others. These flaws could put up to 90 percent of the world’s two billion smartphones at risk for stolen data, password theft, and the potential for hackers even to take control of the device.

  • Keith Alexander turns government experience into lucrative private sector career

    Cybersecurity industry insiders are questioning the ethics behind recently retired NSA chief Keith Alexander’s decision to launch IronNet Cybersecurity, a private consultancy, equipped with patents for what he refers to as a game-changing cybersecurity model. Alexander says there is nothing out of the ordinary here. “If I retired from the Army as a brain surgeon, wouldn’t it be OK for me to go into private practice and make money doing brain surgery? I’m a cyber guy. Can’t I go to work and do cyber stuff?”

  • New device sniffs out billions in U.S. currency smuggled across the border

    Criminals are smuggling an estimated $30 billion in U.S. currency into Mexico each year from the United States, but help could be on the way for border guards, researchers reported. The answer to the problem: a portable device that identifies specific vapors given off by U.S. paper money.

  • Utilities increasingly aware of grid vulnerability

    An analysis by the federal government shows that if only nine of the country’s 55,000 electrical substations were shut down due to mechanical failure or malicious attack, the nation would experience coast-to-coast blackout. Another report finds cybersecurity as one of the top five concerns for U.S. electric utilities in 2014. The report also found that 32 percent of the surveyed electric utilities had deployed security systems with the “proper segmentation, monitoring and redundancies” needed for adequate cyber protection.

  • Harris protests FBI’s Motorola radio upgrade contract

    The Harris Corp. has become the second contractor, afterRELM Wireless Corp., formally to protest the FBI’s decision to award a $500 million non-bid contract to Motorola Solutions Inc., claiming the contract to upgrade the FBI’s 30-year-old two-way radio network was “factually unsound, legally unwarranted and wholly unnecessary.”

  • Home Depot faces lawsuit over Joplin, Missouri tornado deaths

    Home Depot is being sued in a wrongful death lawsuit by a woman who lost her husband and two children during a 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri. Edie Housel is contending that Home Depot is responsible for the death of her family due to the improper construction of the Home Depot store in which the three — along with five other people — were killed.