Healthcare, Technology

Cybersecurity: The Flip Side of The Coronavirus Pandemic

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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Healthcare, Technology

Was The World Short-changed by AI For COVID-19?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay  COVID-19 came hitting hard at the very fabric of our culture, we were ill-prepared for it. Billions of people worldwide are under lockdown, thousands have died, and more are still dying.  Globally, governments, businesses, and individuals are confused, facing an uncertain economic future. Without mincing words, the world was completely unprepared for COVID-19 despite our technological advancements in the areas of AI and machine learning, hence, we are suffering the consequences and direly so.  It is on record that an artificial intelligence company called BlueDot was the first to notice that something weird was going on 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 outbreak that was experienced in 2003. Incidentally, before the World Health Organization (WHO) or the Chinese authorities eventually got around to informing us nearly a week after the emergence of COVID-19, it was late and the harm had been done. The question is, how did we get it wrong?  It would have been expected that since we have progressed so much…

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