Here are a few I have come across the last week or so. Note: Each link is followed by a title and a few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.
General Comment
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It seems to have been a week of hacks and leaks, with AFP raids just to add spice to the going on.
All this makes one worry about security etc. as well as wondering what to do about any juicy leaks that come your way. I suspect the Government is wanting you to just shut up – and not rock the boat.!
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MHR record views by pharmacists up 942%
The Australian Digital Health Agency has released new data showing that the number of pharmacies signed up to My Health record has skyrocketed
According to the Agency, as at April 2018 – before the opt-out period began – only 33% of pharmacies were registered with the system.
As at April 2019, this had climbed to 83%.
Pharmacists are also uploading and viewing My Health Record more often, with a 667% increase in the number of dispense records uploaded to the system, and a 942% increase in the number of record views, when comparing April 2018 to April 2019.
And Tasmanian and Northern Territorian pharmacies are the most likely to be signed up, with 97% of pharmacies in these jurisdictions registered to access My Health Record.
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Queensland Health searches for new eHealth chief executive
June 6, 2019 — 4.01pm
Queensland Health has begun the search for a new eHealth Queensland chief executive, months after former chief executive Richard Ashby resigned amid allegations of a potential undeclared conflict of interest.
Dr Ashby resigned from the role in late January when Queensland Health director-general Michael Walsh referred him to the Crime and Corruption Commission over an alleged undeclared relationship with another staff member.
"The recruitment process to appoint eHealth’s full-time chief executive is under way and will be advertised before the end of June," a Queensland Health spokesman said.
"It is an important role and we will take the time needed to get it right."
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Doctors' identities sold for $750 on the dark web: report
Healthcare increasingly at risk of cyber attack because of the 'goldmine' of personal data: experts
6th June 2019
Doctors’ details are being sold on the dark web for $750, with purchasers able to buy enough documents to pose as a physician, according to US cyber security experts.
Healthcare organisations are increasingly being targeted by cyber attacks because of the “goldmine” of personal data they possess, say the authors of the Healthcare Cyber Heists in 2019 report.
The “hottest” items on the dark web today are provider data and hacked health insurance company login information, the experts from cyber security firm Carbon Black write.
“Provider data is the most expensive and quite alarming, based on the listing descriptions,” they say.
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Call for bigger, better social robot therapy trials
Time for researchers and robots to up their ambitions and focus on weightier issues, says Australian Centre for Robotic Vision
Researchers from the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision are calling for large-scale, major trials of social robots in health and wellbeing settings, after an analysis of current experiments found them to be limited and few in number.
A review of trials of social robots – defined as a humanoid or nonhumanoid robot that can communicate or interact with people using verbal or nonverbal communication – found only 27 of significance.
Many of them lacked a follow-up period; targeted only a small sample group of fewer than participants; and were limited to child health, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and older adults. None of the trials to date have involved adolescents.
Now is the time for researchers and robots to up their ambitions and focus on weightier issues, including depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and eating disorders, the researchers say.
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How a Brisbane startup is using AI to tackle prostate cancer
Maxwell Plus uses Google’s machine learning services to help augment the work of clinicians
Every year around 3500 Australian men die of prostate cancer, according to the Prostate Cancer foundation of Australia. It is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men, and by the age of 75 one in seven men will develop prostate cancer; by the age of 85, that increases to one in five, according to PCFA.
The good news is that the survival rate is relatively high and improving, research from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reveals: Around nine out of 10 men diagnosed with the cancer will survive five years from diagnosis. The five-year relative survival for men diagnosed with prostate cancer increased from 59 per cent in 1986 to 90 per cent in 2007, according to a 2013 report from the AIHW.
However, early detection can have a significant impact on the chances of survival. Brisbane-based startup Maxwell Plus is using artificial intelligence (AI) in an effort to increase early diagnosis of the cancer.
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Digital revolution pushing healthcare industry forward
Nathan Eddy | 07 Jun 2019
Digital solutions and technology have improved connectivity between patients and providers and brought Australia to the brink of a transformative phase in healthcare, according to professional services firm MinterEllison.
The company’s national healthcare leader, Shawn Evans, singled out five areas where healthcare is currently undergoing rapid change, including health trackers, home health, the mobile health workforce, telemedicine and air drop (medical supplies and prescription drugs delivered by autonomous vehicle or drone).
Many of these technological advances – most specifically telehealth and drone-based delivery – could bring improved aid to Australians in far-flung parts of the country.
In some cases, technologies can be combined, MinterEllison noted, such as Skype-based consultations with medical professionals that can be augmented by data from health tracking devices like smartwatches.
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ACT govt puts $70m towards digital health record
Budget funding to upgrade core health systems.
The ACT government has set aside more than $90 million over the next four years to upgrade core IT systems and introduce a digital health record across the territory's public health system.
The funding, revealed in the 2019-20 territory budget handed down yesterday, will be used to support ACT Health’s new 10-year digital health strategy.
The ACT digital health strategy 2019-2029 [pdf], which was released last month, aims to deliver a “future-focused” public health system by investing in modern technology.
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ACT government to implement eHealth record, centralise Oracle licensing
Territory to rollout real-time prescription monitoring
Purchasing a new digital health record system that can support public health services and rejigging Oracle licensing are among the tech-focused initiatives flagged in the ACT’s 2019-20 budget.
The ACT government has earmarked $3.7 million for an effort to centralise its Oracle licensing as part of a push to develop “a strategy for key digital functionality to be managed through cloud-based services,” budget documents reveal.
The ACT’s 2016-19 digital strategy called for increased use of cloud, stating the government “will buy and integrate Cloud services and only undertake bespoke builds when a unique core capability must be satisfied.”
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'There has to be a better way': Taking care of your digital assets when you die
June 3, 2019 — 12.00am
A relationship break-up made Theresa Shaw question what happens to our digital assets once we die.
"I had to replace my phone and was going through all these digital accounts I had and setting them up and I thought 'There has to be a better way'," she says. "I have 20 or 30 different accounts and I thought 'Who is going to close all these things off when I pass away? How will they know what to do with my emails and what is happening with money in PayPal account?'".
The Adelaide-based entrepreneur started investigating digital estates and discovered the rules varied from company to company and are often ambiguous.
"My background is in IT and I thought I am just going to do it and start a business that manages this problem," Shaw says.
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New Zealand’s Health Ministry encourages GPs to give patients access to medical notes
June 05, 2019 11:13 PM
“The more open we are about what we do and share information that belongs to the patient the better,” said Bryan MacLeod, GP owner, the Coromandel Family Health Centre.
In New Zealand, fourteen percent of GP practices with a patient portal are offering patients online access to their medical notes.
Latest figures from the Ministry of Health show that 610 practices out of 970 across the country offer a patient portal. Of those, 86 practices offer Open Notes, up from just 50 in the first quarter of 2017–2018.
Ministry of Health chief medical officer Andrew Simpson says the Ministry encourages general practices to give patients access to their clinical notes.
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Monash Uni looks to spintronics for wearable devices
Flexible polymer alternative to silicon.
Engineering and materials science researchers at Monash University are part of an international collaboration that has come a step closer to realising ‘spintronics’ as a workable, flexible alternative to electronics.
Rather than using the flow of electrons in silicon semiconductors to transmit data, spintronics relies on the magnetic field generated as an electron spins around an atom’s nucleus.
At such a small scale, the magnetic field has quantum-mechanical properties allowing for lower energy use and faster data transfer - the discovery of which earned French physicist Albert Fert the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Speech recognition tech diagnoses respiratory disorders from coughs
App nearly as accurate as a panel of paediatricians
A smartphone app that records children's coughs has been found to be almost as effective at diagnosing common childhood respiratory disorders as a panel of paediatricians who had met with the child and reviewed X-rays, lab results and hospital charts.
In a paper published today, researchers from Curtin University and The University of Queensland demonstrate how they developed algorithms to detect coughs from a recording and produce a high accuracy diagnosis for asthma, croup, pneumonia, lower respiratory tract disease and bronchiolitis.
The work, published in open access journal Respiratory Research, was in two parts. The researchers first developed an automatic cough detector to identify and extract cough sounds in a continuous audio stream. This was done using a Time Delay Neural Network operating and identifying Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), a common technique used in speech recognition systems to, for example, distinguish spoken words from background noise.
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Siri, is this croup or asthma?
A new Aussie app accurately diagnoses cough in children
6th June 2019
Asking children to 'just cough into this phone' may help doctors determine whether a cough is related to asthma, croup or a lower respiratory infection.
An Australian-developed smartphone app can diagnose asthma, croup, pneumonia, lower respiratory tract infections and bronchiolitis with up to 97% accuracy, a study has found.
Using voice recognition technology familiar to Siri users, the automated cough analysis app has been trained to recognise the features of five different respiratory disease, say the researchers from Curtin University in Perth and the University of Queensland.
They tested the app by recording the coughs of 585 children aged up to 12, who were being cared for at two hospitals in WA.
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Voice recognition can tell if your child has asthma or pneumonia
Cough analyser app as accurate as doctors.
A new artificial intelligence based app with similar audio analysis tools used by virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa may soon be helping doctors diagnose respiratory disorders in children.
Parsing out the faint sounds in a child's cough to make an accurate diagnosis can be tough, even for experienced doctors who can also use a variety of other clinical tests to support their diagnosis.
An initial inaccurate diagnosis can lead to poorer care and outcomes for children, as well as the unnecessary prescription of antibiotics which contributes to a global drug resistance problem.
However, a new automated analysis app co-developed at Curtin University and the University of Queensland might be the solution.
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GPs urged to stay vigilant with patient data
The recent ANU data breach has prompted reminders of the importance of protecting patient information.
06 Jun 2019
This week’s data breach at the Australian National University (ANU), in which an estimated 200,000 people were affected, was carried out by what has been described as ‘a sophisticated operator’.
Those same kinds of operators can also target healthcare data, including patient information stored within a general practice, according to the Dr Steven Kaye, Deputy Chair of the RACGP Expert Committee – Practice Technology and Management (REC–PTM).
‘Healthcare data is of particular value to hackers,’ Dr Kaye told newsGP.
‘The patient information held within a typical general practice is extremely sensitive and can be exploited in a number of ways, whether personal, financial or professional.’
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Federal police raid News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst’s home over a secret government spy plan story
Claire Harvey, The Daily Telegraph June 4, 2019
Ms Smethurst, the political editor for News Corp Sunday titles including The Sunday Telegraph, was at home preparing to leave for work this morning when several Australian Federal Police officers arrived with a warrant from an ACT magistrate giving them authority to search her home, computer and mobile phone.
News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst’s home has been raided by police over a story about a secret government plan to spy on Australians.
The Government declined to comment on the report at the time but the raid has come just three weeks after the federal election returned the Morrison Government to power and ensured Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton would remain in his mega-portfolio.
Ms Smethurst complied with the warrant and is presently waiting for the raid to be completed. She has declined to answer questions apart from confirming her identity.
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Outrage as police raid journalist's home
Jun 4, 2019 — 2.20pm
Walkley Award winning journalist Annika Smethurst was at her Canberra home on Tuesday morning when officers produced a search warrant to go through her computer and phone.
Smethurst, the national political editor for News Corpration's top selling Sunday newspapers, revealed in April last year that the chiefs of the Defence Department Greg Moriarty and Home Affairs Department Mike Pezzullo had canvassed giving the Australian Signals Directorate enhanced powers to snoop on Australians' electronic communications.
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Porter: Annika Smethurst ‘not the target’ of AFP raid
June 5, 2019
Attorney General Christian Porter said he had “no idea” federal police were going to raid the home of senior News Corp reporter Annika Smethurst, and that she is not the target of any police investigations.
Mr Porter said this morning that any suggestions the government could have been involved in the raid was “utterly untrue” and that he had not even received a briefing on it as of this morning.
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LandMark White calls police on data breach, accuses banks of 'supporting petty criminals'
June 3, 2019 — 12.00am
Embattled valuer LandMark White has referred the latest breach of its data to police, with the company saying it is has been the victim of a saboteur "hell bent on destroying the company".
Two of the big four banks, which use LandMark White valuation services for home loan applications, have again suspended it from their panels.
The company's chairman Keith Perrett said the banks were implicitly "supporting petty criminals" by suspending the company and giving in to actions of the alleged saboteur.
It follows a data theft incident in January that resulted in 137,500 records being uploaded to the dark web.
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LandMark plea to customers after data breach
Property valuation firm LandMark White is urging its customers to stick with the company, with major customer Commonwealth Bank suspending the use of the LandMark’s services in light of the latest data breach.
“Following LMW’s recent data incident, CBA can confirm we have indefinitely suspended the company from our valuation panel,” a company spokesman said.
“The safety and security of our customer information is of paramount importance to us.”
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LandMark White faces fallout over second data breach
Property valuer again deals with customers suspending their use of LMW services
LandMark White says a “small number” of its clients have suspended their use of its property valuation services in the wake of a data breach.
However, LMW claimed that the majority of its customers “continue to work closely with LMW to understand the disclosure and any impact on their customers and LMW appreciates the way they are responding by supporting LMW, its employees and shareholders rather than acting in a way that ultimately rewards the criminal attempting to damage LMW’s reputation.”
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Landmark White slapped down by valuations body over security claims
Jun 3, 2019 — 12.37pm
Landmark White dismissed its suspension by two of the country's largest banks and said if any other mortgage lenders followed suit in the wake of a second data breach it would only reward what it called "the criminal attempting to damage LMW’s reputation".
But the troubled valuation firm, which suffered a further 16 per cent slump in its share price on Monday, provoked the anger of peers when it said if other lenders followed suit due to the acts of a criminal, it would also put the viability of the wider valuation industry into question.
"One corporate failure does not make an industry failure"
— API chief executive Amelia Hodge
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LandMark White requests new trading halt after banks pull the plug
June 4, 2019 — 6.38pm
Embattled valuer LandMark White has requested its second trading halt in five months, while it investigates the financial impact on its business from being suspended by its banking clients.
In a late notice to the ASX on Tuesday evening, the group revealed it was now frozen off the valuation panels of eight financial institutions including three of the big trading banks and five other lenders.
"The resulting loss of revenues will have a material impact on the performance of LMW but LMW is not able to provide the market with reliable guidance at the current time as it continues to work with the clients to establish a roadmap and time-line for lifting of the suspensions," the company secretary John Wise said in a statement.
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ANU suffers second 'significant' hack in a year
Reveals 19 years of data accessed.
The Australian National University (ANU) has suffered a massive data breach with about 19 years of data accessed by an unknown attacker.
It’s the second major attack against the ANU, which was also hit in mid-July last year. The university at the time blamed an advanced persistent threat (APT) but said the "significant" damage from that incident had been contained.
Vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt said today that a “sophisticated operator” had accessed ANU’s systems again in late 2018 but that this latest breach was not discovered until May 17 this year.
“For the past two weeks, our staff have been working tirelessly to further strengthen our systems against secondary or opportunistic attacks,” Schmidt said in a statement.
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Hackers hit ANU, access ‘significant amounts’ of student, staff data
Data accessed dates back 19 years, ANU says
The vice-chancellor of the Australian National University has revealed that “significant amounts” of sensitive information relating to ANU staff, students and visitors was accessed during a data breach.
The data accessed extended back 19 years, Professor Brian Schmidt wrote in a message to students.
According to the ANU, the information accessed included names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, emergency contact details, Tax File Numbers, payroll information, bank account details, student academic records, and student academic transcripts.
“Systems that store credit cards, travel arrangements, police history checks, workers' compensation, some performance development records or medical records have not been affected,” an FAQ document prepared by ANU said.
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China 'behind' huge ANU hack amid fears government employees could be compromised
June 5, 2019 — 11.45pm
China is the key suspect in the theft of huge volumes of highly sensitive personal data from the Australian National University, which intelligence officials now fear could be used to "groom" students as informants before they move into the Australian public service.
The hacking, which occurred despite the government's elite electronic spy agency last year helping the university bolster its cyber defences, hoovered up 19 years’ worth of personal data including bank numbers, tax details and academic records of students and staff.
Senior intelligence figures have been alarmed by the scale of the breach and the possible motivations behind it, with widespread ramifications for other Australian universities.
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age can reveal the intelligence community fears the data will be used to target promising young students in the hope they can be used as informants as they move through their careers, notably in government departments and even intelligence agencies.
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Monitoring fail allowed Westpac PayID look-up abuse
Compromised harvester accounts made 1900 pings a day.
Retail bank Westpac is facing tough questions over why its security and transaction monitoring systems failed to detect and shut down an automated data harvesting spree of customers’ PayID details used to enable transactions across the real-time New Payments Platform (NPP).
Australia’s oldest bank on Tuesday confirmed it was dealing with abuse of the PayID look-up function which allows its customers to send funds to individuals and businesses in real time by using a secondary customer-nominated and -selected identity instrument then linked to an account.
Westpac’s acknowledgement of the PayID abuse incident follows revelations in the Sydney Morning Herald and on Whirlpool that a whopping 600,000 PayID look-ups were made between April 7th 2019 and May 22nd 2019, a period of just over six weeks.
The SMH’s report is based on a leaked Westpac memo that said around 98,000 PayID look-ups “successfully resolved to a short name and this was displayed to the fraudster”.
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Almost 100,000 Australians' private details exposed in attack on Westpac's PayID
UpdatedJune 3, 2019 — 8.50pmfirst published at 6.58pm
The private details of almost 100,000 Australian bank customers have been exposed in a cyber attack on the real-time payments platform PayID, which allows the instant transfer of money between banks using either a mobile number or email address.
The attack on Westpac, which also affects customers from other banks, has prompted a warning from computer security experts who say that the pilfered data could be used for fraud.
Here's how to know if you're affected, and what you can do to keep your details safe.
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Westpac confirms abuse of New Payments Platform PayID lookups
Bank detected thousands of PayID looksups from compromised accounts, report reveals
04 June, 2019 09:17
A spokesperson for Westpac has confirmed that the bank “detected mis-use” of the New Payments Platform’s PayID feature and “took additional preventative actions which did not include a system shutdown.”
Fairfax Media yesterday revealed details of the incident, citing a confidential Westpac memo that said around 60,000 NPP PayID lookups were made from seven compromised Westpac Live accounts. Around 98,000 “successfully resolved to a short name and this was displayed to the fraudster,” the memo said, according to Fairfax.
“No customer bank account numbers were compromised as a result,” a spokesperson for the bank told Computerworld in a statement. “Westpac Group takes the protection of customer data and privacy extremely seriously.”
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Optus 'concierge' to take grief out of NBN migration
Chases a smoother customer experience.
Optus has created an ‘NBN concierge’ to oversee the connection of customers to the NBN, a move that is clearly intended to help it differentiate from retail providers still competing on price.
The ‘NBN concierge’ is live and has spent the past four weeks handling new customer connections - with strong early results, according to digital product owner Derek Tinworth.
“Connecting customers to [the NBN] has actually been rather challenging - they've had some experience issues with it,” Tinworth told the PegaWorld 2019 conference in Las Vegas this week.
“We saw the opportunity to deliver a personalised hand-held experience for them at key moments while they connect to that network.”
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NBN Co fights to keep control of its 5G spectrum
As bandwidth-hungry commercial carriers circle.
NBN Co is fighting to keep some semblance of control over prime 5G spectrum it has rights to as a multi-year campaign to relieve it of the valuable asset edged closer to success.
NBN Co uses the spectrum for its fixed wireless network. Its rights cover metropolitan and metro fringe zones for five capital cities, and were allocated before the band was declared a major 5G candidate.
For years, the Vodafone-led campaign looked like it would come up short, but in April the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) raised questions about how NBN Co’s urban 3.5GHz holdings should be treated.
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NBN Co's Sky Muster Plus to start at $45 a month wholesale
Satellite charges brought in line with other access techs.
NBN Co will price its forthcoming Sky Muster Plus satellite service that unmeters some traffic and can burst above 25Mbps at a minimum of $45 a month wholesale.
The pricing means that newer plan structures for all NBN access technologies will now start at $45 a month wholesale, helping NBN Co fulfil its desire to raise average revenue per user (ARPU).
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Enjoy!
David.
