Tag Archive for: Effect

Suspect you have experienced a side effect or incident from a healthcare product? Submit a Yellow Card report to improve safety for everyone

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The eighth annual #MedSafetyWeek campaign has today (6 November 2023) been launched by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Part of a global campaign involving 88 countries, the initiative runs from 6-12 November and aims to improve patient safety by encouraging reporting of any suspected side effects from medicines and adverse incidents associated with medical devices.

With this year’s theme being ‘Who can report?’, the campaign focuses on the key role that every patient, carer and healthcare professional has in reporting suspected side effects and adverse incidents with medical devices, and the positive impact this can have on patient safety. You don’t have to prove that the healthcare product caused the side effect or incident – just a suspicion is enough for you to submit a report.

This year’s campaign consists of an international collaboration involving 100 organisations spanning across 88 countries that operate their own national patient safety monitoring systems like the MHRA Yellow Card scheme. The purpose of safety monitoring is to gain information about new side effects and adverse incidents, to find out more about known ones, and, most importantly, to ensure the safest use of medicines and medical devices.

All healthcare products carry a risk of causing adverse reactions or incidents. The Yellow Card scheme is one of several robust measures used by the MHRA to continuously monitor the safety of medicines and medical devices once in clinical use to ensure their benefits continue to outweigh any risks. All healthcare product regulators operate systems to detect and analyse adverse reactions and incidents.

It is important that everyone submits a report to the Yellow Card scheme as soon as they suspect a side effect from a medicine or adverse incident associated with a medical device. This ensures that actions to reduce harm are based on the best available evidence and can improve safety for as many people as possible.

Dr Alison Cave, MHRA Chief Safety Officer, said:

“Every report made to the MHRA Yellow Card scheme counts. Yellow Card reports are vital in building more knowledge and understanding about the potential risks of…

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PSI Fee Change Goes Into Effect on January 1

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Starting January 1, flight schools and FBOs that administer the online aviation knowledge tests will see their cut of the $175 fee drop from $65 to $22 per test. That’s roughly a 70 percent drop in revenue for the businesses in question.

At the present time PSI Services LLC, owned by Lifelong Learner Holdings (LLH), is under contract with the FAA to provide the tests. In years past, there were two other companies, CATS and LaserGrade, but they have gone out of business, giving PSI the monopoly.

On November 18 PSI contacted the flight schools and FBOs to advise them of the fee change. The flight schools and FBOs are third-party providers that offer tests to their customers as a convenience and have no say in the cost of the tests. FBOs and schools contacted by FLYING said the $22 will not cover their costs of administering the tests, therefore they will likely cease to proctor them.

READ MORE: Flight Schools Consider Dropping Knowledge Tests

“This will really damage the fabric of general aviation flight training,” says David St. George, executive director of the Society of Aviation and Flight Educators (SAFE). St. George has been a flight instructor and designated pilot examiner for decades and was one of the first aviation stakeholders to express concern about the impact the change in fee structure will have on the third-party vendors. He describes them as the small mom-and-pop FBOs that provide aviation testing as both a convenience to their customers and as a means to bolster the income during inclement weather when there isn’t a lot of flying.

“There are some 800 of these small testing facilities in the United States, some of them in very out of the way places,” he told FLYING. “They rely on that income from the tests.”

St. George noted that there has also been an increase in knowledge test taking over the past three years or so because of the number of persons desiring to be commercial drone pilots. “If you look at the FAA database on pilot certificates, you will see about half of them are drone pilots now.”

St. George sent a letter to the FAA’s Airman Testing Standards Branch, AFS-630, expressing his…

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NSA: Sanctions on Russia Having a Positive Effect on Ransomware Attacks, Attempts Down Due to Difficulty Collecting Ransom Payments

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National Security Agency (NSA) director of cybersecurity Rob Joyce told attendees of a recent UK security conference that ransomware attacks are down in roughly the last two months, and that trend can be traced directly to sanctions placed on Russia. Criminals that operate out of the country are struggling to find ways to cash out ransom payments and set up infrastructure, due in large part to sanctions attached to the invasion of Ukraine.

NSA director sees downward trend in ransomware attacks due to recent sanctions

The NSA cyber security director told the National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) Cyber UK event in Wales that criminal attempts on government agencies and critical infrastructure had made ransomware attacks a national security priority, and that most of the serious players in this particular segment of the criminal underworld are based in Russia. New sanctions against entities in Russia are thus having a dampening effect on ransomware attacks, as the criminals lose options for doing business with the outside world.

Joyce said that this was likely not the only factor for the reduction in ransomware attacks, but was a significant contributor. Ransom payments are more difficult to process due to lack of access to assorted banking options, and inability to purchase necessary technology to set up the infrastructure for new ransomware campaigns.

Whether or not to formally ban ransomware payments has been a hot topic across the world for several years now, ever since ransomware attacks made a major resurgence. After a lull in the mid-2010s, ransomware roared back in 2017-2018 roughly concurrent with the massive rise in value of cryptocurrencies. Even larger spikes have occurred since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, as both home and work internet traffic greatly increased. While there is some case to be made for cutting these attacks off at the source by banning ransom payments, an argument supported by this recent NSA announcement, many organizations feel that they have no option but to make a payment when they are unexpectedly caught by a breach. This is particularly true for companies that cannot afford even a small amount of downtime, such as health care…

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Log4j threat and how it had a massive effect on various companies and sites?

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Log4Shell is an internet vulnerability that affects millions of machines and is caused by a piece of software called Log4j, which is both obscure and nearly ubiquitous. The programme is used to keep track of everything that happens behind the scenes in a variety of computer systems.

The most significant vulnerability she’s seen in her career, according to Jen Easterly, director of the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of efforts, have already been made to take advantage of the flaw.

So, what exactly is this innocuous bit of internet infrastructure, how can hackers take advantage of it, and what kind of havoc may it cause?

log4j

What is the function of Log4j?

Log4j keeps track of events, such as faults and ordinary system processes, and sends out diagnostic warnings to administrators and users. Apache provides open source software.

Software Foundation is a nonprofit organisation dedicated to the advancement of software

When you type in or click on a poor online link and get a 404 error notice, this is a common example of Log4j in the workplace. There is no such webpage, according to the web server that hosts the domain of the web address you attempted to visit. It also uses Log4j to log the occurrence for the server’s system administrators.

Across all software applications, similar diagnostic messages are used. Log4j is used by the server in the online game Minecraft to log activity such as total memory utilised and user instructions sent into the console, for example.

What is the functionality of Log4Shell?

Log4Shell works by taking advantage of a Log4j feature that allows users to specify custom code for log message formatting. If a separate server maintains a directory linking user names and actual names, this feature allows Log4j to log not just the username associated with each attempt to log in to the server, but also the person’s true name. The Log4j server must communicate with the server that holds the real names in order to accomplish this.

This type of code, however, can be used for more than merely formatting log messages. Third-party servers can upload software code to Log4j that can conduct a…

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