Tag: coronavirus

Healthcare, Technology

Coronavirus: Where The World Got it All Wrong

John Ejiofor / August 17, 2020

Image by cromaconceptovisual from Pixabay Coronavirus has succeeded in exposing inadequacies and shortcomings in our daily lives. As a result of the inadequacies, billions of people worldwide were under lockdown, thousands have died, and more are still dying.  Governments, businesses, and individuals have been thrown into confusion, facing an uncertain economic future. The world, whether developing or developed, was completely unprepared for COVID-19 despite our technological advancements in the areas of AI and machine learning, hence, we are suffering the consequences direly.  The coronavirus pandemic also exposed our ill-preparedness in how we have been handling our supply chains as well as security and privacy. A rundown of the following three very important sectors will bring to light where we failed and also a pointer as to what needs to be done since this may not be the last time we will be facing viral diseases. Technological advancement BlueDot, an artificial intelligence company, was able to notice that something ominous was in the offing and, therefore, went ahead to alert the world of a cluster of “unusual pneumonia” cases occurring around a market in Wuhan, China, about the midnight of December 30, 2019. The company likened the symptoms to those of the SARS, an…

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Technology

How Coronavirus Can Lead to a Boom in Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)

John Ejiofor / May 6, 2020

Image by Jhonatan_Perez from Pixabay APTs (advanced persistent threats) is another brewing pandemic that the world must take into account as we battle the coronavirus pandemic. Quite unlike the black-hat hacker who attempts to gain unauthorized entry into your system or network in an exploitation bid for malicious reasons, APTs perpetrators are inherently more dangerous.   None of these guys has any permission or authority to compromise your network, but they still find ways to do so. Their sole aim is to inflict damage by compromising your security systems, altering functions of websites, networks, and even to the extent of shutting down systems.  They place so much emphasis and effort in gaining access to your passwords, financial information, and other personal data. The coronavirus pandemic, unfortunately, has given them a great opportunity to practicalize their nefarious activities. However, while ordinary black hat hackers will go for the immediate gains and possibly let you off the hook to enjoy their spoil, the perpetrators of APTs are another ball game altogether. They are as the name portends, very persistent, canny, dangerous, and outrightly deadly. The coronavirus pandemic has completely thrown the world off balance and nobody is sure of anything, it’s novel and everything about it…

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Healthcare, Technology

Cybersecurity: The Flip Side of The Coronavirus Pandemic

John Ejiofor / April 30, 2020

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay There were insinuations that coronavirus was an accident from a laboratory in Wuhan that was studying bat coronaviruses and then spread to the public, though, this has been debunked by the WHO. If indeed it had been, then the persons behind the evil plan did not take a lot of things including the cybersecurity impact into cognizance. What would it have been like if, for an accident, the whole world was thrown into this mammoth amount of cybersecurity threats and attacks we have been experiencing? Sherrod DeGrippo, senior director of threat research and detection at Proofpoint was reported to have observed that the total volume of phishing emails and other security threats as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic now represents the largest coalescing of cyberattack types around a single issue that has been seen globally and maybe for a long time to come. Check Point Threat Intelligence, revealed that since January 2020, there have been over 4,000 coronavirus-related domains registered globally. While 3% of the websites were found to be malicious, an additional 5% are suspicious.  Check Point Threat Intelligence also pointed out based on hindsight that coronavirus-related domains are 50% more likely to be malicious…

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Technology

How You Can Best Help The Workforce in The Coronavirus Crisis

John Ejiofor / April 17, 2020

Photo Credit: U.S. Pacific Fleet Flickr via Compfight cc IT leaders are known to always be on the hot seat, working under pressure, but the coronavirus pandemic has taken it to another dimension altogether. Being in charge of technology for your organization has always not been easy as you don’t know when a serious crisis is brewing but what we have currently is that everybody was hit at the same time with little or no room for preparedness.  Everybody is right now trying to work remotely as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. There is no doubt that the transition in working habits that are bordered on technology and culture must have to be going through a lot of stress and you need to put in place a huge amount of effective change management in these very tough circumstances.  How are you going to handle the fact that people must work from environments not conducive to work? There must be constraints in the workspace, some people may need to work from home where there are kids especially now that schools are closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.  You must have been having difficulties focusing on the mental well-being of your…

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Technology

How Technology Can Help While The World Battles Coronavirus

John Ejiofor / March 16, 2020

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay The continuing global spread of the coronavirus scourge is seriously putting businesses on the bad spot and it means that without any appreciable effort at terminating the spread, businesses will have to come up with out-of-the-box ideas to stay functional. The major concern everybody is facing is if the level of global advancement in technology has prepared the business world for such mammoth upheaval in the way and manner we conduct our day-to-day businesses.  Technology has to come in to help tame the spread unless we either want to all die off. This will be the case if we lack basic amenities that we need from our companies for our daily living due to closure of businesses or if we have to dare the consequences and go on as if nothing has happened in order to ensure the amenities are there.  There is no need to overemphasize the fact that businesses are in for the very real probability that urging employees to go into the office, is all we need to heighten the risk of spreading coronavirus. This is where all the latest advancements in technology will come to the front burner as the world grapples with…

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