What I'm Reading 3/16/2020 - Pandemic Response Being Slowed By Cyber Attacks

Books -

Network Forensics Tracking Hackers Through Cyberspace

The Ten-Day MBA 4th Ed.: A Step-By-Step Guide To Mastering The Skills Taught In America's Top Business Schools

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

Blogs / News - 

AP - Government official: Coronavirus vaccine trial starts Monday -

The first participant in a clinical trial for a vaccine to protect against the new coronavirus will receive an experimental dose on Monday, according to a government official.
The National Institutes of Health is funding the trial, which is taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. The official who disclosed plans for the first participant spoke on condition of anonymity because the move has not been publicly announced.

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Testing will begin with 45 young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself. The goal is purely to check that the vaccines show no worrisome side effects, setting the stage for larger tests.

Reuters - U.S. Health Department hit by a cyberattack: Bloomberg - 

The reporter, in a tweet on Monday, cited unnamed sources who said there were multiple hacking incidents that appeared aimed at slowing down the department’s systems. Representatives for HHS could not be immediately reached for comment on the report. 

Reuters - French antitrust regulator fines Apple $1.2 billion -

In its decision, the French regulator said Apple imposed prices on retail premium resellers so that the prices were aligned with those charged by the California firm in its own shops, or on the Internet.

The watchdog said Apple’s two wholesalers in France fully followed the U.S. company’s instructions on how to allocate its products to customers, instead of freely determining their commercial policy.  

 Sydney Morning Herald - Far from bouncing back, China's economy may be shrinking -

By the end of this month, he expects 85 to 90 per cent of Chinese firms will be back in production. But this is not as happy as it may seem. Hofman, formerly the China country director for the World Bank, doesn't see a strong rebound.
Many firms will go broke and many people will lose their jobs. And even as China's economy comes back on line, the rest of the world is shutting down, he points out, so can't buy Chinese exports. Beijing's ability to stimulate the economy is constrained by the fact that there is already too much debt.

The net result will be that China cannot meet its goal of 6 per cent economic growth for the year, in Hofman's assessment. He estimates China's 2020 growth at between 2 per cent and 4.5 per cent. This is bad news for China, and unhappy news for a world waiting for its locomotive. No one will be feeling very smug about that.

Bank Info Security -  COVID-19 Complication: Ransomware Keeps Hitting Healthcare -

With COVID-19 declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, healthcare facilities in some countries have already been overwhelmed by the need to care for patients with severely compromised respiratory systems, as well as to rapidly test anyone they suspect of being infected.

In the meantime, healthcare organizations continue to face hack attacks from criminals attempting to infect them with crypto-locking malware and then demand a ransom in return for the promise that they'll unlock forcibly encrypted files.