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Innovations driving the Indian dental consumables market.

A breath of hope.

Cybersecurity tips to prevent healthcare organizations from having to swallow a bitter pill.

Nutritional solutions to reduce harmful impact of air pollution on cardiovascular health.

App to revolutionise pain measurement and management.

Medical device connectivity enhances portability of patient data but poses cybersecurity risks.

FDA approves sugar made from Brazil’s first genetically modified sugarcane.

Aleph Farms beefs up clean meat.

Singapore Diagnostics and Lucence Diagnostics partner to market cancer blood tests in Philippines.

Singapore’s first TCR immunotherapy clinical trial for liver cancer.

FDA grants orphan drug designation to ASLAN003 for acute myeloid leukemia.

In this modern era, malware has emerged as a malicious cyber threat to critical information and communication infrastructure. Ransomware is a type of malware which holds the victim’s computer hostage by encrypting the data available on it, which makes the data unusable and inaccessible to its legitimate user. The attacker demands that the user pay before the decryption key is released to reverse the attack. This chapter explains about ransomware and its classification, how it impacts different platforms, the severity of ransomware, the methodology used by ransomware to penetrate target machines, the attack vectors used, the latest ransomware attacks, the most common targets of ransomware attacks, how to prevent ransomware attacks, and ways to recover.

Blockchain is being viewed as a mechanism that can further protect and enhance the security of data due to its properties of immutability, auditability and encryption, whilst providing transparency between parties who may not know each other and who therefore are operating in a trustless environment. It’s true that blockchain has its roots in cryptocurrency applications and is still evolving for that purpose in the financial sector, but many other organisations across different industries are beginning to see the non-crypto use cases in which this mechanism can be used to record data that cannot be changed or reversed or as smart contracts (as a way to time-stamp transactions between parties). Consequently, blockchain is becoming extremely relevant and purposeful. Organisations have various options. They can run blockchain as permissionless (anyone can join), permissioned (invitations are required) or hybrid (like a consortium). They can also choose whether data should be held on-chain or off-chain in data lakes. With industry entering its fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), the addition of blockchain as a complementary technology has its place; there are some industries very suited to the significant impact it may bring. Also, the advances made in areas such as Internet of Things and Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence may have considerable impact on the amount of data we collect for analysis and the ways in which we store, manage and analyse it. They may also increase the likelihood of cyber attacks and the ripple effects they cause. This has also become complicated, as cyber attacks have become much more sophisticated in recent years. Cyber attacks come in different configurations, and various industry sectors have suffered from a range of these different attack vectors, resulting in some devastating outcomes. These cyber attacks have manifested in the shape of ransomware, malware, manipulation methods, phishing and spear-phishing. Whilst data breaches are a serious incident, there is a growing concern in most organisations regarding attacks that are designed to have a more destructive effect, such as the Ukraine cyber attack in 2015 that resulted in a shutdown of the power grid, or the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017 that caused widespread chaos with healthcare institutions unable to carry out any tasks since access to data/systems was unavailable.