Colouring BookPsThe DoctorForwardInstagram photo by Doctor Who Colouring Book • May 2016 at UTCSee moreNews, views, and insight from the ESET security community A US government probe into claims that certain heart implants are vulnerable to hacking attacks, has resulted in emergency security patches being issued for devices that cardiac patients have in their homes. The medical devices under the microscope come from St Jude Medical, recently acquired by Abbott Laboratories, who were informed by researchers last year that their devices could be forced to malfunction by administering a mild electric shock, pacing at a potentially dangerous rate, or tricked into suffering a high-risk battery drain. Controversially, research company MedSec Holdings and hedge fund Muddy Waters reportedly profited by short selling stock in St Jude Medical, before telling the manufacturer about the serious vulnerabilities. The St Jude Medical Merlin@home Transmitter connects the tiny computer inside a patient’s implanted cardiac pacemaker to a doctor’s surgery or clinic, using a telephone line, internet connection or 3G cellular network to communicate critical information about a patient’s heart activity.

The good news for patients is that they don’t have to make as many trips to the clinic, and don’t have to see their doctor in person so often. Remote monitoring allows a doctor to both monitor how a heart is behaving, and see if the implanted device is behaving unusually. From this point of view, the technological advance can be seen as a good thing. easton e200p backpack reviewBut there is a genuine concern – as we have described before – that the rush to embrace technology to improve and save patients’ lives could introduce high-tech risks.f64 bpx backpack Perhaps most memorably, security researcher Barnaby Jack demonstrated in 2012 how he reverse-engineered a device to deliver a deadly 830 volt shock to a pacemaker from a distance of 30 feet, and discovered a method to scan insulin pumps wirelessly and configure them to deliver more or less insulin than patients required, sending patients into a hypoglycaemic shock.zlyc backpack reviews

In a press release announcing its security updates, St Jude Medical emphasised that it was “not aware of any cyber security incidents related to a St Jude Medical device.” “We’ve partnered with agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) unit and are continuously reassessing and updating our devices and systems, as appropriate,” said Phil Ebeling, vice president and chief technology officer at St. Jude Medical.dragon backpack 3oh3 Carson Block, CEO of Muddy Waters, meanwhile believes that going public about the vulnerabilities forced St Jude Medical to take swifter action to fix them, and feels that the fixes do not go far enough:backpack pathfinder srd “…had we not gone public, St. Jude would not have remediated the vulnerabilities. arcteryx ac2 backpack

Regardless, the announced fixes do not appear to address many of the larger problems, including the existence of a universal code that could allow hackers to control the implants.” Researchers claim that the St Jude Medical devices use very weak authentication, opening up potential opportunities for non-hospital staff to hack a home device into sending electrical shocks and malicious firmware updates to vulnerable implanted devices. While more investigation is conducted into how the implanted devices themselves might be made more secure, patients are urged to make sure that their Merlin@home units are plugged in, and connected a phone line or cellular adapter to receive the current and future security updates automatically.Fashion AmydyvelcronaStreet FashionWinter FashionFashion DiaryCasual FashionFashion LovesYork FashionFashion NewsHigh FashionForwardDeath by Elocution - super cool look - dark navy, charcoal and black combined (cant see which is which but I love it) - look at the rolled skinny jeans detail with the ankle strap shoes.

The notion of machine-powered facial recognition is one that predates today's actual technology for it by many years, thanks to robot POV shots from sci-fi films such as The Terminator and Robocop. But while many advances have been made, facial recognition software is far from infallible, as researchers from Carnegie Mellon University recently found. Here are the details from a report in Quartz: Researchers showed they could trick AI facial recognition systems into misidentifying faces--making someone caught on camera appear to be someone else, or even unrecognizable as human. With a special pair of eyeglass frames, the team forced commercial-grade facial recognition software into identifying the wrong person with up to 100% success rates. Modern facial recognition software relies on deep neural networks, a flavor of artificial intelligence that learns patterns from thousands and millions of pieces of information. When shown millions of faces, the software learns the idea of a face, and how to tell different ones apart.

As the software learns what a face looks like, it leans heavily on certain details--like the shape of the nose and eyebrows. The Carnegie Mellon glasses don't just cover those facial features, but instead are printed with a pattern that is perceived by the computer as facial details of another person.In a test where researchers built a state-of-the-art facial recognition system, a white male test subject wearing the glasses appeared as actress Milla Jovovich with 87.87% accuracy. The test wasn't theoretical--the CMU printed out the glasses on glossy photo paper and wore them in front of a camera in a scenario meant to simulate accessing a building guarded by facial recognition. The glasses cost $.22 per pair to make.The glasses also had a 100 percent success rate against the commercial facial recognition software Face++, although in this case they were digitally applied onto pictures, Quartz notes. CMU's research follows similar efforts by Google, OpenAI, and others, it adds. While Quartz's report emphasized the security risks associated with the vulnerability of neural networks regarding facial recognition, there are other serious matters to consider as well, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson.CMU's research "shows us a lot of our intuitions about computerized object recognition are false," he says.

"When I say 'intuition,' I really mean we've learned our expectations for artificial intelligence from watching science fiction. What we've got is a huge set of technologies that are still evolving. There's an urgent public discourse about what it all means, from self-driving cars to airport security, but it's based on a simplistic understanding of how machines see."Today's neural networks go beyond old-fashioned methods of object recognition -- tagging, extracting features and colors, then processing the information to identify various objects -- Wilson notes. Neural networks are touted as reflecting how the human brain works, with the ability to learn over time. That's what makes CMU's research so important. "CMU comes along and says we can take a thing like a pair of glasses that doesn't even resemble the target face at all and the neural network triggers off something about the object," he says. "The neural network is latching onto non-obvious features. You can fool it, in ways that lay people could never have anticipated."

Wilson points to the incident in June, when a US man became the first person to die in a self-driving car accident. His Tesla's sensor system was unable to distinguish between a tractor trailer crossing the road and the bright sky, and the car drove into it at high speed with fatal results. "I'm not blaming neural networks per se, but I am concerned that these new vision systems are much harder to analyze and debug than the classical computer programs we've come to expect," Wilson says. Neural networks are seen as a key component in getting self-driving cars to market and on the road en masse. The CMU research should give those eager to see this happen serious pause, and realize it's time for a more sophisticated public conversation about neural networks. "If someone gets killed [in a self-driving car] and the case goes to court, can we get the system's logs and see what the car saw? That might not be possible," he says. "I reckon that policy-makers think it does work like that.""Neural networks just don't have a step-by-step algorithm and audit log," he adds.