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This weekly blog is to explore the news around the larger issues around Digital Health, data security, data privacy, AI / ML. technology, social media and related matters.
I will also try to highlight ADHA Propaganda when I come upon it.
Just so we keep count, the latest Notes from the ADHA Board were dated 6 December, 2018 and we have seen none since! Its pretty sad!
Note: Appearance here is not to suggest I see any credibility or value in what follows. I will leave it to the reader to decide what is worthwhile and what is not! The point is to let people know what is being said / published that I have come upon.
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‘This must not be permanent’: Privacy experts sound alarm over QR codes
April 10, 2021 — 7.09pm
Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello has promised mandatory venue check-ins will be lifted “as soon as we get the green light from health experts”, as privacy experts warn the COVID-19 check-in tool lacks safeguards.
Mr Dominello said the QR code system was only intended for contact tracing during “pandemic conditions” but those might continue for some time.
“As soon as we get the green light from health experts that it is no longer necessary, the QR check-in requirement for high-risk venues will be removed,” he said.
Mr Dominello said the data was securely stored for 28 days and then destroyed, and “under no circumstance ... shared with other parties or agencies outside NSW Health”. Privacy was at the “forefront of our thinking” when delivering digital services, he said.
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The new world of ‘deep fake’: How cyber attackers impersonated senior ministers, diplomats
April 10, 2021 — 5.00am
When Hong Kong pro-democracy activists last month received messages from Australia’s Finance Minister, Simon Birmingham, on encrypted messaging service Telegram, they were overjoyed. But it was too good to be true.
The activists quickly realised something was up when “Birmingham” requested they transfer money into a Hong Kong bank account. It was, in fact, a cyber hacker who had somehow managed to verify a Telegram account with Birmingham’s phone number, thereby stealing his contact book. This “phishing” scam also hit Health Minister Greg Hunt, Australia’s ambassador to the United States Arthur Sinodinos and a number of other senior diplomats.
The episode has sent shockwaves and paranoia through the senior ranks of the Australian government and diplomatic corps. It should serve as an early warning that we’re about to enter a new world of “deep fakes”, where we will need to go the extra step in verifying the person we’re talking to is, in fact, who they claim to be.
How did the hackers do it?
Applications such as Telegram, Signal or WhatsApp require you to verify your phone number – with your phone – before you can set up an account. In this instance, the cyber hackers somehow attained the phone numbers of scores of senior Australian politicians and officials and went on a phishing expedition on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app that was widely used in the Hong Kong protests. Numerous politicians and diplomats received messages asking them to verify Telegram. Senior security sources also confirmed WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, was a target but the hackers were less successful on that application.
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https://www.itwire.com/development/ai-use-in-asia-pac-only-in-isolated-projects-idc.html
Thursday, 08 April 2021 11:07
AI use in Asia-Pac restricted to isolated projects: IDC
The use of artificial intelligence is growing in companies in the Asia-Pacific region, but it is mostly used in silos for isolated projects, the technology analyst firm IDC says.
In a statement, the company said a study it had conducted found that 52% of the organisations that had invested in AI were "still in the earlier maturity stages, in which AI is used in silos by select individuals/groups or for isolated projects".
"More so, these organisations have no formal strategy/co-ordination and/or such strategies are only limited to specific projects."
Dr Chris Marshall, associate vice-president for AI and big data and analytics at IDC Asia-Pacific, said: "As Asia/Pacific organisations prioritise digital acceleration and resilience, AI has become a core capability.
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https://medicalrepublic.com.au/a-certain-digital-behemoth-is-blocking-innovation/43256
9 April 2021
A certain digital behemoth is blocking innovation
Steve Posnack describes himself as “the No 1 No 2 digital health policy development and implementation staffer in the US”.
His role, as the deputy national coordinator for Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT), in the US, reports directly to a serious political minder appointed by the ruling party of the day.
Yesterday he officially got his new boss from the Democrats, and while Posnack is that sort of refreshing intelligence that can somehow keep you onside regardless of the politics in play, you get a distinct feeling of energy and optimism that is perhaps a little more than his everyday exuberance for his work (of which he always has a lot) and something to do with the Trump regime moving on (for now anyway).
Posnack’s job – how he’s managed it in the past 10 years, who he reports to – should inform how Australia might better go about converting some pretty robust thinking on digital health in this country into, first, meaningful policy and then successful implementation.
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The five questions directors need to ask about cyber security
Sally Patten BOSS editor
Apr 9, 2021 – 12.15am
John Mullen wouldn’t wish it on anyone. The Telstra chairman also sits at the helm of logistics group Toll, which was the victim of two cyber attacks in 2020.
Of the first attack, Mullen says: “I can’t remember the time of day now, but you get those calls at midnight or one o’clock in the morning. We were all on deck almost immediately. We didn’t know for some while how far it had gone and how damaging it was, but it escalated by the hour. It was really scary and as a director you really have to look at yourself in the mirror and say: ‘Jesus, what could I have done to have at least mitigated it, if not stopped it?’”
They are questions no director wants to have to ask themselves. Sadly the trend is not on their side. Some 95 per cent of CEOs cited cyber risks as the top threat to business growth this year, up from 86 per cent last year, in a survey of Australian chief executives published in late March by professional services firm PwC.
ANZ’s institutional banking boss, Mark Whelan, told The Australian Financial Review Banking Summit last week that cyber security was the biggest threat facing the banking sector, adding that the number of attacks had escalated during the pandemic to the point where ANZ was receiving 8 to 10 million attacks a month. In late March, Nine Entertainment, the publisher of The Australian Financial Review, was hit by a cyber attack, disrupting its broadcast and print operations.
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Global IT spending expected to rise 8.4% to $4.1 trillion this year
· Dow Jones
Chief information officers and other corporate technology leaders are moving on from stopgap information technology measures deployed during the coronavirus pandemic and eyeing more ambitious projects, according to the latest IT spending forecast by research and consulting firm Gartner Inc.
Companies world-wide are expected to spend $4.1 trillion on IT this year, up 8.4% from 2020 and regaining the pace of corporate IT growth before Covid-19 brought much of the global economy to a standstill, Gartner said.
Many businesses are bolstering videoconferencing and collaboration tools, which helped support remote work during the crisis, as they lay the groundwork for a permanent shift to hybrid offices combining physical and virtual workspaces.
Ramped up spending of more than 10% from last year on both enterprise software and devices is expected to lead the gains, Gartner said.
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I used Clubhouse and saw why it’s expected to be valued at $5b
The invite-only social media app has attracted millions of users since its inception just a year ago, cementing itself as a Silicon Valley favourite.
Katie Canales
Apr 8, 2021 – 8.55am
Key Points
- Clubhouse is an invite-only, audio social media app featuring conversation rooms that users can tune into.
- It launched in March last year and has grown into a popular platform, reportedly valued at $US4 billion ($5.3 billion).
- I tried it out and found why it was so successful during the pandemic, when people lacked community.
Clubhouse is one of those things I’ve kept at arm’s length for months – until now.
The invite-only social media app has attracted millions of users since its inception just a year ago, cementing itself as a Silicon Valley favourite. It’s also reportedly in talks for a funding round that values the company at $US4 billion ($5.3 billion).
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Australian privacy watchdog examines Facebook data dump
Max Mason Senior reporter
Apr 8, 2021 – 9.22am
The privacy watchdog has begun looking into the personal details of more than 7.3 million Australians’ personal details following a massive dump of information on more than half a billion Facebook user profiles.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), which is already litigating against Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, is in the early stages of assessing the information that was made available for free on a hacking forum over the Easter long weekend.
“The OAIC is conducting inquiries into the issue reported in the media and seeking to establish the facts and circumstances, including the extent to which the personal information of Australians may have been impacted,” an OAIC spokesman said.
The dump includes personal information of more than 533 million Facebook users from across the world in 106 countries. Alon Gal, the co-founder of cyber security firm Hudson Rock, posted details that showed more than 7.3 million Australian user accounts were subject to the leak.
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https://apo.org.au/node/311724
What’s really at stake with vaccine passports
5 Apr 2021
Publisher Centre for International Governance Innovation
COVID-19 Electronic surveillance Immunisation Digital identity Disease management Infectious diseases
Description
As the world looks to slowly emerge from the grip of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and more than a year of associated border closures, travel restrictions, widespread shutdowns and other limitations on once-normal activities, the idea of a digital 'vaccine passport' for COVID-19 is also gaining momentum. While proposals come in different varieties, sometimes called 'vaccine passports,' 'immunity certificates' or 'green passes,' among other names, the underlying idea is the same — to provide a digital certificate or credential intended to prove something about an individual’s health status with respect to the pathogen responsible for COVID-19, such as whether the individual has been vaccinated against, tested negative for or recovered from the virus.
Each implementation requires a combination of health information, identity verification tools and a mechanism for presenting the certificate or credential, typically in the form of a digital wallet that can present a Quick Response (QR) code or another digital artifact. While we are quite focused on the health information and technology components, we should not lose sight of the third identity-related pillar. In fact, rather than thinking about vaccine passports as temporary, isolated, public health-related measures, we should view them as just one example of how the pandemic is accelerating the rollout of digital identity infrastructure and consider the broader implications for society, particularly as commercial and economic incentives predominate.
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https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/healthcare-providers/cyber-security/cyber-security-awareness
Cyber security awareness
Helping healthcare organisations to develop awareness of cyber risks and security behaviours
Are you a healthcare consumer?
Resources
Our Cyber Security Centre
Further cyber security support
Subscribe to cyber security alerts
Contact us
General enquiries
Phone: 1300 901 001
8am - 5pm (AEST/AEDT) Monday - Friday
Email: help@digitalhealth.gov.au
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https://www.itnews.com.au/news/home-affairs-agrees-to-new-five-year-data-centre-deal-with-cdc-563053
Home Affairs agrees to new five-year data centre deal with CDC
By Justin Hendry on Apr 7, 2021 12:40PM
As Global Switch migration gets underway.
The Department of Home Affairs has struck a new five-year data centre hosting deal with Canberra Data Centres to support its migration from Global Switch’s Sydney-based data centre.
The $6.3 million contract, published last week, will allow the department to shift its remaining unclassified and protected-level data from the Chinese-owned facility by July 2022.
The deal comes just weeks after Home Affairs boss Mike Pezzullo revealed the department was finalising a contract with a new Australian-owned data centre provider for the planned exit.
Home Affairs is one of several federal government agencies continuing to use Global Switch, which is no longer an approved data centre provider on the data centre facilities suppliers panel.
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Tech industry revolt against Porter’s appointment grows
Paul Smith Technology editor
Apr 6, 2021 – 6.10pm
Pressure is rising on Prime Minister Scott Morrison to reverse his decision to appoint Christian Porter as the Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, as more technology industry players spoke out against him taking responsibility for a sector that has sought to increase the participation of women.
The embattled former Attorney-General, who has denied raping a teenage girl 33 years ago when he was 17, responded to a report in The Australian Financial Review, in which executives including Microsoft director of start-ups for the Asia-Pacific, Emily Rich, said the industry would reduce its engagement with the government due to his appointment.
Critics have said that, aside from the shadow of the unresolved rape allegations, Mr Porter lacks experience in technology and would be too focused on saving his political career and a defamation fight over the ABC’s coverage of the allegations, to properly lead the sector.
“As the incoming minister, I look forward to working closely with all those who share the government’s interest in helping businesses to innovate and grow, while also generating new and higher-paid job opportunities for Australian workers,” Mr Porter said in an emailed response to questions about industry concerns.
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How tapping into telehealth has extended our reach of services
By Marion
Adeney-Steel, Clinical Lead Physiotherapist at Remedy Healthcare
Tuesday, 30 March, 2021
COVID-19 has forced most industries to adapt and change, but the healthcare sector is one that will likely never return to a pre-COVID normal. Digital transformations that were pegged to take decades happened almost overnight due to the pandemic. Transformations such as advances in telehealth, particularly in video, changed the way healthcare providers, such as Remedy Healthcare, delivered and continue to deliver services.
Prior to COVID-19, Remedy Healthcare Allied Health Services operated exclusively in-person but the announcement of lockdown restrictions in March 2020 forced us to make a critical decision — find a way to consult with patients remotely or risk losing the ability to consult with and treat our patients altogether. With 350 healthcare professionals across nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, podiatry and exercise physiology, this was no easy task.
The solution to our dilemma — a situation I can imagine many other healthcare services across the country faced — was to shift to entirely remote consultations. This choice was vital for protecting the health of our clients and employees. Leading Australian video telehealth platform Coviu was integral in enabling us to continue servicing patients throughout lockdowns and beyond.
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Why the COVIDSafe app failed
Dave Colls
April 5, 2021
The 27th of this month will mark the 1st birthday of the Australian Government’s COVID-19 contact tracing app. You know, the one that keeps a log of bluetooth connections your smartphone makes with the mobiles of people you’ve come into contact with? The one that would make it simpler for health authorities to trace potential COVID-19 carriers in the case of a positive diagnosis? The one that just under half of us would need to download and use?
Australia is not unique when it comes to launching a COVID contact tracing app that didn’t quite live up to the hype.
According to an Oxford University Report, when it comes to the effectiveness of a tracing app about 60 per cent of the population needs to “use the app and adhere to the app’s recommendations”, but Australia didn’t reach that. In fact, COVIDSafe was languishing at No. 8 in iTunes App Store’s health and wellness charts – one behind the Tasmanian Government’s own QR code scanning app Check in TAS.
Despite good intentions and many merits, the notion that a particular app was the solution to a health and societal crisis was the root problem for countries that jumped on the Covid tracing app bandwagon. Perhaps the only two to come out smiling were Ireland, because its app was spectacularly cheap to build and hence a cheap failure, and New Zealand, which led with a truly integrated approach.
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https://www.afr.com/technology/banks-look-for-shared-effort-in-escalating-cyber-war-20210401-p57g0i
Banks look for shared effort in escalating cyber war
Paul Smith Technology editor
Apr 5, 2021 – 10.43am
Chief information security officers at two of Australia’s big four banks believe improvements in real-time intelligence sharing and assistance for smaller businesses to beef up their cyber security would help the industry navigate increasingly dangerous waters, after Australian Prudential Regulation Authority chairman Wayne Byers last week said a material breach at a major institution was inevitable.
The threat of cyber attacks crippling the operations of major companies came into sharp focus last week after Nine Entertainment, the publisher of The Australian Financial Review, was compromised by a suspected ransomware attacks, from which it is still recovering.
Mr Byers’ comments came at last week’s Australian Financial Review Banking Summit, where Australia and New Zealand Banking Group institutional banking boss Mark Whelan described cyber attacks as the biggest single threat in banking today.
Speaking to the Financial Review following the summit, ANZ’s chief information security officer, Lynwen Connick, said the last year had had a significant increase in the pace, scale and sophistication of cyber threats; ANZ now is blocking between 8 million and 10 million malicious emails a month, compared with 4 million a month a year ago.
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Facebook data on more than 500 million accounts leaked online
Associated Press
Apr 5, 2021 – 7.57am
New York | Details from more than 500 million Facebook users have been found available on a website for hackers.
The information appears to be several years old, but it is another example of the vast amount of information collected by Facebook and other social media sites, and the limits to how secure that information is.
The availability of the data set was first reported by Business Insider. According to that publication, it has information from 106 countries including the phone number of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook users, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, and email addresses.
Facebook has been grappling with data security issues for years. In 2018, the social media giant disabled a feature that allowed users to search for one another via phone number following revelations that the political firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed information on up to 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent.
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Facebook data on millions of users re-emerges online for free
By Kurt Wagner
April 4, 2021 — 3.20pm
The personal data of more than half a billion Facebook users re-emerged online for free on Saturday (US time), a reminder of the company’s ability to collect mountains of information and its struggles to protect these sensitive assets.
The leak includes personal information on 533 million Facebook users, such as phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birth dates, bios and in some cases email addresses, Business Insider reported.
“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
At the time, the company addressed a flaw in its technology that allowed the information to leak out. However, once such data escapes from Facebook’s network, the company has limited power to stop it from spreading online.
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https://www.chnact.org.au/for-health-professionals/digital-health/my-health-record/
My Health Record
For Health Professionals Digital Health ADHA Propaganda
My Health Record is a secure online summary of a person’s key health information. It is part of a national system that is accessible anytime, anywhere. This allows medical professionals and patients to access their health record wherever they are as long as there is internet connection. Patients can control which health practitioners are approved to access but this protocol can be breached during an emergency situation.
Patients, GPs, specialists and pharmacists can add clinical documents in My Health Record. This includes:
- Shared health summaries, allergies, discharge summaries, diagnostic and pathology reports.
- Prescription records and pharmacists shared medicine lists.
- Medicare documents such as Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) claims, Australian Immunisation Register (AIR) records, and organ donor register status.
- Emergency contact, advance care planning documents and custodian details.
Having access to all this health information may avoid adverse drug reactions for patients, can improve communication between a patient’s multidisciplinary care teams, and may avoid duplication of services.
The Australian Digital Health Agency is constantly working collaboratively with various software providers to make it easy for health care practitioners to view, download and upload clinical information.
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Comments more than welcome!
David.
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