GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Hackers steal cosmetic surgery photos from Lithuanian clinic

sábado, 3 de junio de 2017

BioEdge: Hackers steal cosmetic surgery photos from Lithuanian clinic | BioEdge

BioEdge: Hackers steal cosmetic surgery photos from Lithuanian clinic

Hackers steal cosmetic surgery photos from Lithuanian clinic

by Michael Cook | 2 Jun 2017 |

This stark example of how medical electronic records are vulnerable to violations of privacy comes from Lithuania. Hackers stole 25,000 photographs plus passport and credit card details from the Grozio Chirurgija cosmetic surgery clinic and then threatened to post them online unless they were paid.

The hackers, who call themselves the “Tsar Team” posted the images and personal information on a Dark Web website and are selling them for between €50 and €2,000 each or for €344,000 for the whole package.

“Clients, of course, are in shock. Once again, I would like to apologise,” Jonas Staikunas, the director of Grozio Chirurgija, told local media. “Cybercriminals are blackmailers. They are blackmailing our clients with inappropriate text messages.”

This attack is much more targeted and professional than the Wannacry ransomware virus last month. The hackers took the trouble to scale the amount of the ransom according to individual patients. Clients from Denmark, Germany, Norway and the UK have already received extortion notices.

Saturday, June 3, 2017

Now that President Donald Trump has backed out of the Paris Climate Change agreement, employment prospects for bioethicists may pick up. Let me explain

The boundaries of bioethics are very elastic, and on some maps they take in care for the natural environment. I would predict that in the measure that scientists lose faith in a political solution to global warming, some will back geoengineering projects to cool the planet.

These include tactics such as injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere, dumping iron filings into the sea to promote algal blooms, and machines to capture carbon dioxide. These involve significant risk and place great power in the calculations of technocrats. They need to be studied very carefully. As University of Chicago climate scientist Raymond Pierrehumbert said a few years ago, “I see lots [of geoengineering ideas] that are feasible but they all terrify me.”

A 2010 conference on the ethics of climate intervention at Asilomar, in California, addressed some of these issues using principles drawn from the famous Belmont principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-malificence and justice. And who knows more about these than bioethicists? Dust off those resumés.