Tag: small business news

How U.S. schools proved Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was safe

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When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines last December—a year after the coronavirus was first identified in Wuhan, China—it was a dramatic piece of good news after one of the most disruptive years the country has ever experienced. Now consider the thrill people felt in April 1955 when Dr. Jonas Salk’s new polio vaccine was officially declared to be “safe, effective, and potent.” That came more than 60 years after the first known polio outbreak in the U.S., which took place in rural Rutland County, Vermont in 1894. It killed 18—mostly children below the age of 12–and left 123 permanently paralyzed. From there, polio became an enduring, mysterious scourge. In 1916, it hit New York City, killing 2,343 out of a total of 6,000 nationwide that year. In the 1940s and early 1950s, the number of incidents in the U.S. grew eightfold, reaching 37 per 100,000 population by 1952. The fact that children were most susceptible to the disease made it only more terrifying. The Salk vaccine was approved only after going through the largest clinical trial in history. Rather than being a government project, this test was overseen and paid for by a nonprofit organization founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938: The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, better known as the March of Dimes. (Roosevelt himself had contracted polio at the unusually advanced age of 39.) More than 1.3 million children participated; some got either the vaccine, which required three shots over a five-week period, or a placebo, while others underwent observation for polio. The only logical way to reach so many children was through schools. The result was an unprecedented national effort built atop public-education infrastructure Read More …

Discord and Slack are becoming potent tools for malware attacks

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Attackers are finding the file-sharing capabilities in popular group-chat apps such as Discord and Slack a convenient way to distribute malware, warns a new report from Cisco Talos, Cisco’s threat intelligence unit. The risk isn’t just that hackers can gain access to a particular channel and trick people in it into downloading malware. Once a file containing malicious code is uploaded, attackers can also grab a freely accessible link to that file where it’s hosted on the chat system’s servers. Then, they can send that link to people via phishing emails, misleading texts, or any other method they have of reaching potential victims. In some cases, malware can connect to these sorts of links to download additional malicious code once it’s already running on victims’ machines. Some malware also uses group-chat apps to share data with and receive commands from the people operating it, according to the report. In particular, Discord has an API (application programming interface) that enables programs to automatically post messages to channels on the service via a digital address called a webhook. That’s useful for many legitimate purposes, but it’s also valued by malware creators who want their software to essentially phone home from infected machines. And during the coronavirus pandemic, as more people are using platforms such as Discord and Slack to stay in touch with friends, coworkers, and others, so too are criminals moving to these tools for their own convenience, according to the Cisco Talos researchers. Malware and commands sent through these channels can blend in with other, legitimate traffic. “We’ve seen a marked increase in the abuse of collaboration apps like Discord and Slack to be used to both distribute malware and as a command-and-control system,” says Nick Biasini, a Cisco Talos threat researcher who worked on the report. Functionality such as that offered by Discord “allows them to manage command and control without having to manage their own server.” One challenge for people trying to thwart these attacks is that malware and commands sent through these channels can blend in with other, legitimate traffic to files and chat rooms hosted on these platforms. Seeing a URL that mentions Discord, Slack, or another trusted channel might also help lull users into a false sense of security when it appears in a phishing email. And it’s also not possible for security experts to take down the domain hosting the malicious content, since it’s commingled with legitimate Slack or Discord files from around the world rather than on a domain of its own. In some cases, hackers use malware to harvest digital access tokens that can be used to connect to Discord, according to the report. Read More …

Why the Air Force has its own venture capital fund

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The Defense Department is trying to renew its once robust relationship with Silicon Valley to find the technologies needed to confront 21st-century threats. The Air Force is taking the novel approach of establishing a venture capital firm within its ranks that locates, invests in, and opens doors for promising defense startups. AFVentures is a division of an Air Force technology acquisition and development group called AFWerx (the AF stands for Air Force and Werx is shorthand for “work project”) established in 2017. AFWerx is something like the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) within the DOD, which began looking into the private sector for promising defense technologies back in 2015. For many years the DOD has relied chiefly on technologies developed either within the government or by a small group of large contractors such as Boeing or Raytheon. There’s a growing belief within defense circles that to address the new nontraditional and cyberwarfare threats on the horizon, the U.S. needs to tap into the cutting-edge innovation happening outside those universes. Sidestepping the ‘Valley of Death’ One of the biggest things AFVentures does is help small startups survive the brutal process of qualifying for a defense contract. The DOD’s procurement process is famous for its complexity and slowness. It’s a five-phase affair that starts with technology analysis, then moves to product prototyping, then engineering and manufacturing, then production and deployment, and ends with operations and support—and that’s if the project isn’t rejected or starved of funding. It’s a mind-numbingly labyrinthine system clogged with red tape and paperwork. Larger contractors have large staffs of people to wade through the process, but smaller tech companies face a real challenge managing all the work. That means a smaller startup might do a successful pilot project for a branch of the military but then parish while waiting for a sustainable long-term contract to materialize. Read More …

The Air Force is using this mental health service to help with stress

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The pandemic has been stressful for everyone, and that includes members of the military. In the past two years, suicide rates among active military service members have gone up 15%. The military has long offered resilience training and access to therapy, but in 2020, the Air Force decided to take a different course of action. It began offering an innovative mental health platform called NeuroFlow to make care more accessible and to track how members were doing, so it could intervene if it seemed someone was a risk to themselves. “It is known throughout the mental health community that the Department of Defense is experiencing a spike in suicides at an alarming rate,” says Durel Williams, a Master Sergeant in the U.S. Air Mobility Command, where he’s responsible for 2,800 security forces members. Of those, 600 have signed up for NeuroFlow, which tracks fitness, sleep, well-being, loneliness, depression, alcohol use, and anxiety. It also offers tools for emotional regulation, like guided meditation, journaling, and video and written resources. All of this data becomes part of a user’s electronic health record. Artificial intelligence will then alert clinical staff about people who seem at risk. So far, 12 people have been flagged as at-risk, and in one instance a person was stopped from harming themselves. [Photo: courtesy of NeuroFlow] Military members can sign up for the app anonymously. Their data is also shared only with healthcare providers, not management. If they are flagged for any reason, a care coordinator gives them a call to check in on them and see if they need more help. Before this pilot with NeuroFlow, the military offered mental health care through traditional talk therapy and resilience training. Williams has been working as a resiliency trainer for the last 10 years, giving people tools to help them rebound from a difficult situation. However, accessing care is complicated. In order to see a therapist, service members are removed from duty, which is extremely stigmatizing. However, Williams says, it is a necessary step. “Their duty is to secure and protect, and they are on an arming roster where every day they’re expected to be able to pick up their weapon and go to work. Read More …

Want to make healthcare cheaper? Bring the hospital to you

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At first blush, the idea of moving most healthcare from hospitals and medical offices to people’s living rooms seems impossible. Of course, once upon a time, so did getting your groceries without leaving your couch. Or voting. Or attending college. Or talking to your doctor. Or virtually any of the activities in our daily lives that used to require going somewhere and doing something. There’s not many silver linings to COVID-19, but the emergence and acceptance of virtual healthcare is certainly one of them. Patients and doctors are now far more comfortable interacting over video or text, discussing intimate healthcare issues, prescribing treatment and conducting the follow up, all without anyone having to go anywhere. No one with a fever prefers climbing into a car or squeezing onto a crowded subway to sit in a germ-infested waiting room only to eventually have a doctor ask the same standardized questions that could have fit into a text Read More …