Month: February 2016

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, a hospital in Los Angeles, is the victim of what officials describe as an ongoing cyberattack. A hospital spokesperson told Ars in a prepared statement that "patient care has not been affected" by the intrusion. And an executive of the hospital told reporters that the attack was "random" and not targeted at patient records.

However, local news organizations have reported that some emergency patients were diverted to other hospitals—and that some of the hospital's systems have been locked down by ransomware. The hospital has reverted to paper patient registration and medical records, according to NBC 4 in Los Angeles, and the hospital's network has been shut down for over a week.

A spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Investigations' Los Angeles office confirmed to Ars that HPMC had been targeted in a cyberattack, but he declined to comment further as an investigation is ongoing. The amount being demanded by the attackers to provide the key to unlock the hospital's systems has not been made public, though it has been reported to be as much as 9,000 Bitcoin—the equivalent of $3.6 million.

An Android-based smartphone costing about the same as a cup of coffee has been launched today in India by the local company Ringing Bells. The Freedom 251 costs 251 rupees (about £2.50 or $4), comes with a one-year guarantee, and has surprisingly decent specifications, on paper at least. The phone's price is not subsidised by a carrier contract: it really costs £2.50.

It sports a 4-inch display, a 1.3 GHz quadcore processor, and a 1450mAh battery. It comes with 1GB RAM and 8GB of internal memory, with micro SD card support up to 32GB. There's a 3.2-megapixel rear camera and a 0.3MP front camera.

The Freedom 251 runs Android 5.1, and offers a range of pre-installed apps: global ones such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and YouTube, along with others designed for the Indian market. These include Women Safety, Swachh Bharat ("a mass movement for cleanliness"), and vertical apps aimed at those in the health, farming, and fishing sectors. Sales of the Freedom 251 start in India tomorrow, Thursday February 18, at 6am local time.

The US Department of Defense announced today that it is to standardize on Windows 10. Over the course of the next year, some 4 million systems will be upgraded to Microsoft's latest operating system in what must be the largest enterprise deployment of the operating system worldwide.

This is a followup to a November order to upgrade systems in Combatant Commands, Service Agencies, and Field Activities to the operating system. The rationale is the government's desire to protect better against security breaches and reduce IT costs by streamlining on a single platform. Windows 10 is better protected against security flaws than its predecessors, making it a tougher target for attackers.

In tandem with this, the government has given the Surface 3, Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 4, and Surface Book all the relevant certifications to allow those systems to be included on the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Unified Capabilities (UC) Approved Products List (APL). This means that DoD agencies can now buy and use Surface family hardware in its deployments.