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The State of Machine Learning in 2019

Here we are, almost four whole months into 2019 and machine learning and artificial intelligence are still hot topics in the security world. Or at least that was the impression I had. Our 2019 CISO Benchmark Report however, found that between 2018 and 2019, CISO interest in machine learning dropped from 77% to 67%. Similarly, interest in artificial intelligence also dropped from 74% to 66%.

Now there are a number of reasons why these values could have dropped over a year. Maybe there’s a greater lack of certainty or confidence when it comes to implanting ML. Or perhaps widespread adoption and integration into more organizations has made it less of a standout issue for CISOs. Or maybe the market for ML has finally matured to the point where we can start talking about the outcomes from ML and AI and not the tools themselves.

No matter where you stand on ML and AI, there’s still plenty to talk about when it comes to how we as an industry are currently making use of them. With that in mind, I’d like to share some thoughts on ways we need to view machine learning and artificial intelligence as well as how we need to shift the conversation around them.

More effective = less obvious

I’m still amazed by how machine learning is still a hot topic. That’s not to say it does not deserve to be an area of interest though. I am saying however, that what we should be talking about are the outcomes and capabilities it delivers. Some of you may remember when XML was such a big deal, and everyone could not stop talking about it. Fast forward to today and no one advertises that they use XML since that would just be obvious and users care more about the functionality it enables. Machine Learning will follow along the same path. In time, it will become an essential aspect of the way we approach security and become simply another background process. Once that happens, we can focus on talking about the analytical outcomes it enables.

An ensemble cast featuring machine learning

Anyone who has built an effective security analytics pipeline knows that job one is to ensure that it is resilient to active evasion. Threat actors know as much or more than you do about the detection methods within the environments they wish to penetrate and persist. The job of security analytics is to find the most stealthy and evasive threat actor activity in the network and to do this, you cannot just rely on a single technique. In order for that detection to happen, you need a diverse set of techniques all of which complement one another. While a threat actor will be able to evade one or two of them simultaneously, they don’t stand a chance against hundreds of them! Detection in diversity!

To explain this, I would like to use the analogy of a modern bank vault. Vaults employ a diverse set of detection techniques like motion, thermal, laser arrays, and on some physical dimension, an alarm will be tripped, and the appropriate response will ensue. We do the same in the digital world where machine learning helps us model timing or volumetric aspects of the behavior that are statistically normal and we can signal on outliers. This can be done all the way down at the protocol level where models are deterministic or all the way up to the application or users’ behavior which can sometimes be less deterministic. We have had years to refine these analytical techniques and have published well over 50 papers on the topic in the past 12 years.

The precision and scale of ML

So why then can’t we just keep using lists of bad things and lists of good things? Why do we need machine learning in security analytics and what unique value does it bring us? The first thing I want to say here is that we are not religious about machine learning or AI. To us, it is just another tool in the larger analytics pipeline. In fact, the most helpful analytics comes from using a bit of everything.

If you hand me a list and say, “If you ever see these patterns, let me know about it immediately!” I’m good with that. I can do that all day long and at very high speeds. But what if we are looking for something that cannot be known prior to the list making act? What if what we are looking for cannot be seen but only inferred? The shadows of the objects but never the objects if you will. What if we are not really sure what something is or the role it plays in the larger system (i.e., categorization and classification)? All these questions is where machine learning has contributed a great deal to security analytics. Let’s point to a few examples.

The essence of Encrypted Traffic Analytics

Encryption has made what was observable in the network impossible to observe. You can argue with me on this, but mathematics is not on your side, so let’s just accept the fact that deep packet inspection is a thing of the past. We need a new strategy and that strategy is the power of inference. Encrypted Traffic Analytics is an invention at Cisco whereby we leverage the fact that all encrypted sessions begin unencrypted and that the routers and switches can send us an “Observable Derivative.” This metadata coming from the network is a mathematical shadow of the payloads we cannot inspect directly because it is encrypted. Machine learning helps us train on these observable derivatives so that if its shape and size overtime is the same as some malicious behavior, we can bring this to your attention all without having to deal with decryption.

Why is this printer browsing Netflix?

Sometimes we are lucky enough to know the identity and role of a user, application, or device as it interacts with systems across the network. The reality is, most days we are far from 100% on this, so machine learning can help us cluster network activity to make an assertion like, “based on the behavior and interactions of this thing, we can call it a printer!”. When you are dealing with thousands upon thousands of computers interacting with one another across your digital business, even if you had a list at some point in time – it is likely not up to date. The value to this labeling is not just so that you have objects with the most accurate labels, but so you can infer suspicious behavior based on its trusted role. For example, if a network device is labeled a printer, it is expected to act like a printer – future behavior can be expected from this device. If one day it starts to browse Netflix or checks out some code from a repository, our software Stealthwatch generates an alert to your attention. With machine learning, you can infer from behavior what something is or if you already know what something is, you can predict its “normal” behavior and flag any behavior “not normal.”

Pattern matching versus behavioral analytics

Lists are great! Hand me a high-fidelity list and I will hand you back high-fidelity alerts generated from that list. Hand me a noisy or low fidelity list and I will hand you back noise. The definition of machine learning by Arthur Samuels in 1959 is “Field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.” In security analytics, we can use it for just this and have analytical processes that implicitly program a list for you given the activity it observes (the telemetry it is presented). Machine learning helps us implicitly put together a list that could not have been known a priori. In security, we complement what we know with what we can infer through negation. A simple example would be “if these are my sanctioned DNS servers and activities, then what is this other thing here?!” Logically, instead of saying something is A (or a member of set A), we are saying not-A but that only is practical if we have already closed off the world to {A, B} – not-A is B if the set is closed. If, however we did not close off the world to a fixed set of members, not-A could be anything in the universe which is not helpful.

Useful info for your day-to-day tasks

I had gone my entire career measuring humans as if they were machines, and not I am measuring humans as humans. We cannot forget that no matter how fancy we get with the data science, if a human in the end will need to understand and possibly act on this information, they ultimately need to understand it. I had gone my entire career thinking that the data science could explain the results and while this is academically accurate, it is not helpful to the person who needs to understand the analytical outcome. The sense-making of the data is square in the domain of human understanding and this is why the only question we want to ask is “Was this alert helpful?” Yes or no. And that’s exactly what we do with Stealthwatch. At the end of the day, we want to make sure that the person behind the console understands why an alert was triggered and if that helped them. If the “yeses” we’ve received scoring in the mid 90%’s quarter after quarter is any indication, then we’ve been able to help a lot of users make sense of the alerts they’re receiving and use their time more efficiently.

Conclusion

We owe a big round of applause to artificial intelligence for birthing the child we know, and love named machine learning and all that it has contributed to security analytics over the past year. We remain pragmatic in its application as we know that, just because it is the new kid on the block, we cannot turn our backs on simple or complex lists of rules, simple statistical analysis, and any other method that has got us to where we are today.

Lucky for us, machine learning has already shown signs of playing well with its peers as we continue to find ways to improve existing security processes through pairing them with ML. It can’t solve every single problem on its own, but when it works together with the people and processes that have come before it, we get that much closer to a more secure future. And if Machine Learning is the child of AI, who then are its brothers and sisters that we have yet to explore in Security Analytics? We have some big ideas and some already in prototype state, but remember, in the end, we will ask you if it is helpful or not helpful, not all the data science mumbo jumbo!

As always, we welcome your comments below. Readers who enjoyed this blog would also benefit from viewing our library of recent Cybersecurity Reports or checking out our new Threat of the Month blog series.

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Episode 4: DevNet for retail

What is the best way to simplify a retailer’s IT architecture? It comes down to two words: Programmable. Store. The objective is to leverage an expanding partner ecosystem alongside compelling services to deliver custom, digital experiences that are tailored to the retailer’s needs.

When developers come together with a holistic retail platform, new levels of programmability are made possible with plug-and-play options. In this way, lean IT teams can move fast to deliver experiences on top of Cisco’s programmable network and UCS.

Episode 4 (7 mins) continues the conversation around retail IT (see episode 1 here), and takes a different format with a special host. Let’s see how Cisco’s DevNet community is enabling agile IT for retailers.

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  Don’t forget to subscribe to our Retail blog so you don’t miss our fifth video in the series, going live next week.

  AND, check out our DevNet for Retail webpage for more information from this episode.

What are the top technology investment priorities today? Comment below or join the conversation over at our Retail solutions YouTube channel!

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What SPs Need to Know About Customer Engagement for the Large Enterprise Buyer

Large enterprises are a complex beast. Merely mapping the buying process as well as the customer journey is not only complicated, but also varies across different vertical segments and is consistently multi-faceted and longer in duration than SMB and midmarket enterprises.

In the previous two blog posts, I highlighted the importance of omni-channel customer engagement – both offline and digital. While it is easy to assume that the large enterprise customer engagement model has to be completely offline (sales people, customer support, onsite engagement), the digital component plays an increasingly critical in the large enterprise segment.

According to Forrester, 74% of B2B buyers do their research on products and services online (digital engagement) before contacting or meeting with a sales person (offline engagement).

Three Ways SPs Can Optimize for the Large Enterprise Segment

In order to take advantage of the cloud calling and UCaaS opportunity in the large enterprise segment, Service Providers need to do the following three things:

1.    Focus on the Completeness of Your Solution

How does your cloud calling solution integrate and extend to other parts of the business? Today’s large enterprises are looking for integration capabilities and have a strong desire to extend any point solution into other parts of the business. To the extent that they can, large enterprise buyers favor a “full stack” solution – calling, messaging, meetings, and even contact center in a single suite. Additionally, large enterprises are looking for each integration (or rather the ability to play nice with others) when choosing a solution.

2.    Emphasize How You Adapt to Different Vertical Segments

Regardless of what market segment you are targeting, knowing your customer is key in order to make your offer as compelling as possible. For large enterprises, consider emphasizing the vertical segment and the specific needs within a particular segment.

For example, security is a priority for federal, state, and local governments. Healthcare organizations are under intense pressure to maintain privacy and comply with regulations. The ability to support an omni-channel experience – mobile, web, kiosks, and brick and mortar locations – is key for the retail segment. As a final example, financial institutions have stringent requirements for data integrity, storage, and protection.

It is important to weave both into the positioning and messaging as well as in the service creation of the various offers how the SP offering addresses these unique requirements of each vertical segment.

3.    Highlight the Evolution of the Offering & How It Supports the Business Roadmap

When it comes to cloud calling and UCaaS solutions, it’s not a “buy once and be done with it” type of transaction. Instead, it’s a continuous evolution of the product and its capabilities. Strategize how you can integrate your product and offer roadmap into the enterprise business roadmap and growth plans.

Since large enterprise buying decisions are complex and involve multiple parties, it is important to show the TSO and ROI of the solution and map it to specific business outcomes. Large enterprises are under pressure to stop buying the next shiny new object and are looking for solutions that truly drive business outcomes and productivity gains in a tangible, measurable manner.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, I’m interested in hearing your feedback on my four part customer engagement blog series as I tried to address each segment and its key success areas:

Cisco Launches Digital Accelerator for Service Providers to Drive End to End Customer Engagement

Small Business Buyers Over-Index on Digital Journeys

Winning Over the Midmarket Buyers – 3 Customer Engagement Tips

  Want to learn more? Cisco recently launched a new program, the Digital Accelerator for Service Providers, to help Service Providers improve customer engagement along each part of the customer journey.

What SPs Need to Know About Customer Engagement for the Large Enterprise Buyer published first on https://brightendentalhouston.tumblr.com/

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The World Runs on Wi-Fi: With Wi Fi 6, Now Is the Time to Open Up More Unlicensed Spectrum for It

At Cisco, we could not be more excited about this week’s launch of our generational advance in Wi-Fi technology known as Wi-Fi 6. And it’s no wonder why: the world truly does run on Wi-Fi. As we enter an era of 5G, IoT, and AI, our new Wi-Fi 6 access points and switching technology will be at the heart of the innovative new applications and services that will positively impact consumers, governments, and businesses around the world.

Before we get there, however, we have to consider the impact policymakers will have on achieving the benefits of these transformational wireless technologies.

No one will experience the full power of Wi-Fi 6 and 5G unless policymakers can find more spectrum for Wi-Fi. As wonderful as Wi-Fi 6 is, globally it is being launched on existing radio spectrum. That spectrum in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands is “chopped up” into non-contiguous pieces. In order to deliver communities and businesses the high-speed experience of today, industry has to take these non-contiguous blocks and further separate them into smaller channels. Make no mistake, our industry is working hard to efficiently deliver fast broadband, but for Wi-Fi 6, we will not be taking full advantage of the technology unless we can feed it a larger number of wider channels available on contiguous spectrum.

Why should the arrival of Wi Fi 6 prompt regulators to act? Because the innovation contained in Wi-Fi 6, as evidenced by Cisco’s latest access points, is transformational. Not only can this technology improve the battery life of your devices, it can speak multiple “RF languages,” use airwaves much more efficiently by simultaneously targeting delivery of communications to individual devices, improve spectrum re-use, perform better in congested environments, support AR and VR for learning in the classroom and the enterprise, and easily connect to all those devices in your home or business that are connected today or begging to be connected in the future. And that’s a partial list. Wi-Fi 6 is a big, big deal.

Policymakers should also be delighted that the biggest radio ecosystem measured by traffic – namely, Wi-Fi – has managed to figure out multiple ways to improve spectrum utilization in this, its 6thgeneration of technology. That’s important because while global Wi Fi traffic in 2017 amounted to 52.5 exabytes per month, by 2022 it will be flowing at a rate of 202.8 exabytes per month. And, policymakers should be happy that this latest technology both supports improved user experiences and addresses many more use cases to make our economy shine brighter.

We applaud regulators in the US and Europe for taking a hard look at whether additional spectrum can be made available to Wi-Fi 6 technologies. Both the US FCC and the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations are presently considering opening the 6 GHz band to unlicensed use.

As is always the case with radio spectrum, there are serious issues to be addressed, including how incumbent radio systems can be protected if unlicensed enters the band. However, we are confident that there is a path regulators can find to give one of the world’s most critical technologies – Wi-Fi – the improved access to spectrum needed to realize its full ambitions.

The World Runs on Wi-Fi: With Wi Fi 6, Now Is the Time to Open Up More Unlicensed Spectrum for It published first on https://brightendentalhouston.tumblr.com/

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Qakbot levels up with new obfuscation techniques

Qakbot, also known as Qbot, is a well-documented banking trojan that has been around since 2008. Recent Qakbot campaigns, however, are utilizing an updated persistence mechanism that can make it harder for users to detect and remove the trojan. Qakbot is known to target businesses with the hope of stealing their login credentials and eventually draining their bank accounts. Qakbot has long utilized scheduled tasks to maintain persistence. In this blog post, we will detail an update to these schedule tasks that allows Qakbot to maintain persistence and potentially evade detection.

Read More >>

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Incident response: Putting all the R’s in IR

It is well established that the ‘R’ in IR stands for “Response.” But given the challenges facing incident response teams today, IR could just as well stand for “It’s Rough.” The landscape is challenging, tools are multiplying, and the talent shortage seems insurmountable.

First of all, according to Cisco’s recent CISO Benchmark Study, 79 percent of security leaders are finding it challenging to orchestrate threat response in a multi-vendor environment. There has also been a drop from Cisco’s 2018 survey in the number of legitimate security alerts organizations are remediating – down from roughly 50 percent last year to just under 43 percent this year. All this means that incident response is not getting any easier: only 35 percent of security professionals find it easy to determine the scope of a compromise, contain it, and remediate it.

Attackers continue to innovate and come up with new attack types at a record pace. They’re so brazen that they even use Facebook and other social networks to share tools and sell stolen, personal information. Meanwhile, security teams struggle to keep up with this innovation, acquiring new technology to deal with every emerging threat.

IT infrastructure is too complicated, and resources are too scarce, to manage all of these tools and derive the intended benefits from them. Especially since, often times, security products don’t talk to one another – requiring the manual analysis and comparison of seemingly infinite alerts and logs to try to make sense of what’s going on.

But there is some good news in all of this. According to a Cybersecurity Almanac published by Cisco and Cybersecurity Ventures, Fortune 500 and Global 2000 CISOs are expected to reduce the number of point security products they are using by 15-18 percent this year. Additionally, our CISO Benchmark Study tells us that more security teams are using time to remediate as a success metric for their operations (48 percent compared to just 30 percent last year). Remediation is difficult, demonstrating that security teams are setting the bar very high for themselves.

This hopefully shows that organizations are allowing CISOs to think more strategically about security – and that the C-suite in general is perhaps realizing that it’s about more than just buying a bunch of products and hoping they work.

Three more R’s: readiness, recon, and remediation

In actuality, there’s more to the ‘R’ in IR than just ‘response.’ To effectively respond to attacks, organizations not only have to react when they occur, but also:

Be prepared for them in the first place. (Readiness.)

Have an efficient way of obtaining visibility into any threats that make their way in. (Recon.)

Mitigate attacks as quickly as possible. (Remediation.)

How do you master all these R’s? First of all, if your environment is made up of dozens of security technologies each performing siloed tasks and not sharing intelligence, you can’t really succeed. You will never have enough time, resources, and patience to piece all of this disparate information together and identify attacks before they rip through your environment.

At Cisco, we are constantly trying to figure out how to make security better to more effectively protect today’s businesses. Above all else – beyond all the latest features and capabilities – we focus on integrated security above everything. We don’t want our products to protect against just one type of attack, or secure just one area of the network. We want to cover you from edge to endpoint – and we want our products to work together to lessen the burden on you and your team.

Here are some of the newer ways we are helping to fortify organizations’ incident response plans, and putting all the R’s in IR.

Cisco Stealthwatch – A whole lot of readiness  

Talk about being prepared. Cisco Stealthwatch has recently become the first and only security analytics platform to provide comprehensive visibility and threat detection across today’s modern infrastructure – including private, hybrid, and public multi-cloud environments. It automatically aggregates and analyzes security information across the entire enterprise to deliver a clear, understandable look at what’s going on 24/7. Stealthwatch prioritizes the most critical issues for the security team, and enables team members to easily drill down into any alerts that require further investigation.

Essentially, Stealthwatch serves as the eyes and ears of the network, using a combination of behavioral modeling and machine learning to pinpoint anomalies that could signify risk. It even detects threats in encrypted traffic without the burden of IT teams having to do decryption. In addition to monitoring on-premises infrastructure and private clouds, Stealthwatch can monitor all public cloud environments including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

Cisco Threat Response – Advanced recon and remediation

In the one year since we introduced our threat response platform, included for free with several of our security products, Cisco Threat Response (CTR) has become a foundation for fast, efficient incident investigation and response across the entire Cisco security architecture. It brings together threat intelligence from Cisco and third-party technologies, as well as Cisco Talos, via a single, intuitive console.

CTR reduces the need for security teams to shift between different interfaces and manually piece together data. If a threat is uncovered, it can be quickly remediated directly through CTR. The result is dramatically accelerated threat detection, investigation, and response.

This year, we unveiled a new browser plug-in for CTR to further simplify investigations. With the plug-in, if you are on a web site (such as the Talos blog) that includes information and observables on specific attacks, you can easily pull those observables into CTR to determine if the attack is present in your environment. It works with any web page that includes data on Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), allowing security analysts to quickly kick off the threat investigation process.

AMP for Endpoints – Speaking of recon and remediation…  

Some of you may already be familiar with our Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) technology. But do you know that it can be used to proactively hunt for the riskiest one percent of threats in your environment to improve both security posture and operations? AMP for Endpoints provides a holistic view of all end devices on your network, including IoT devices. It continuously monitors and records all files to quickly detect stealthy malware.

AMP provides valuable insight into how malware got in, where it’s been, what it’s doing, and how to stop it. This greatly simplifies investigations and shortens incident triage and mitigation time. Once a threat is uncovered, you can quickly block it within AMP using just a few clicks.

Through integrations with other prominent Cisco security technologies, this investigation and remediation can also be extended to other parts of the network beyond just endpoints. AMP can see a threat in one area of your environment and then automatically block it everywhere else it appears.

Integrated solutions for accelerated response

These are just a few of the ways Cisco is helping to speed and improve incident response. These new features are complemented by our comprehensive, integrated security portfolio, as well as a full array of professional services.

Putting all the R’s in IR? That’s Imminently Reachable.

Find out how we can help. See our infographic to get started.

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The trouble with new drugs

When a drug is approved by the FDA, it may seem like it’s only a matter of time before some unexpected side effects are discovered. Perhaps it seems that way because it’s true! According to a study of all drugs approved between 2001 and 2010, the FDA announced alerts, warnings, or recalls on about one-third of them in the years after their approval.

Some of the side effects were minor and easily managed. For example, there might be a warning to avoid taking a new medication at the same time as another medication. But sometimes the “side effect” is death. And that’s the case with a new warning about the gout drug febuxostat.

An ancient disease, new treatments, new concerns

Gout can cause joint pain that’s excruciating and debilitating, but it is highly treatable and even preventable. In recent years, a number of new drugs have been approved, including febuxostat. Although it was approved in 2009, some of the early studies raised concerns that people who took febuxostat might have a higher rate of cardiovascular events such as heart attacks. As a result, the FDA required the drug’s maker to perform additional research after its approval.

The additional research confirmed that the safety concerns were justified: when compared with people taking allopurinol, an older gout drug, researchers observed a small but significant increase in the rates of cardiovascular death, and death from all causes, among people taking febuxostat. This led the FDA to issue a “black box warning” — the strongest action short of a recall — about the risks of taking this drug and how allopurinol should be tried first.

If you’re taking febuxostat now, talk to your doctor about this new development and whether you should continue it, stop it, or switch to another treatment.

What’s a black box warning, anyway?

Depending on the level of concern, the FDA has several ways to communicate new warnings regarding the safety of an approved drug:

Medication guides. These are printed reports routinely provided to patients by pharmacists for certain medications, intended to reduce serious side effects.

Prescription drug labeling. This is the package insert that provides detailed information about an individual drug. These often contain a section for patients using nonmedical terminology, though most of the content is in “medicalese” and intended for health professionals.

Drug Safety Communications. These include Public Health Advisories and other updated drug safety alerts.

Boxed warning. Often called a black box warning, this information appears at the beginning of the package insert and is intended to call attention to serious or life-threatening side effects. That’s what was added to the package insert for febuxostat.

Drug recalls. Although they may come at the request of the FDA, most drug recalls come from drug makers as a voluntary action. They may be permanent or temporary, depending on the problem.

Drug withdrawals. Even more rarely, evidence comes to light that convinces the FDA that the risk of taking a drug is simply too high when compared to its potential benefits. In these cases, the drug’s approval is essentially reversed, and the FDA requires the drug be taken off the market.

(You can find out more about how the FDA monitors the drug approval and post-approval process here.)

Why does this happen so often?

As I was beginning to write this post, yet another alert was released by the FDA. This time it was for tofacitinib (Xeljanz), a medication approved in 2012 to treat rheumatoid arthritis (RA). A higher than expected rate of blood clots in the lungs and death was found among the drug’s users. Some important caveats are worth noting, though: the trial was required by the FDA; it enrolled people with RA who were 50 and older and had at least one cardiovascular risk factor; the dose was 20 mg/day, roughly twice the currently approved dose for RA. (However, this dose is approved for people with ulcerative colitis.)

Why aren’t more of these problems detected before drugs are approved?

There are a number of reasons, but the biggest one has to do with the difference between clinical trials required prior to a drug’s approval and real world usage. A trial may exclude people with heart disease, or who are elderly, or may include only men or only women — but once the drug is approved, men and women, people with heart disease, and older individuals may start taking the medication. New problems may emerge in this expanded group of people that weren’t detected before.

In addition, there’s a numbers issue. Clinical trials may include hundreds or even thousands of study subjects, but to detect a small risk it may take tens of thousands of individuals, or even more. For these reasons, post-marketing surveillance plays a major role in ensuring the safety of medications approved by the FDA.

While the high rates of alerts and warnings may make it seem like the FDA is doing a lousy job of making sure drugs are safe before approving them, there’s another way to look at this. The high rate of alerts and warnings could mean that the post-approval monitoring is working to detect previously underappreciated problems and to publicize them.

Here’s where you come in

If you develop a side effect from a medication you’re taking, let your doctor know. You may need to stop taking the drug to avoid more trouble. But you can also report your experience to the FDA’s MedWatch Safety Information and Adverse Event Reporting Program (here or at 800-332-1088). You could be helping to identify an important and previously unrecognized problem with the medication.

While new drugs can truly be lifesaving, sometimes the latest breakthrough drug turns out to be worse than older treatments or the disease itself. Despite the years of research required to get a drug approved, important risks can be missed. We have to rely on post-market surveillance to detect these risks. You can help.

Follow me on Twitter @RobShmerling

The post The trouble with new drugs appeared first on Harvard Health Blog.

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Wi-Fi 6 is for Developers!

Wi-Fi 6 is here, and it opens a new chapter in networking. With its enhanced connectivity, the way we access the network and our experiences while connected fundamentally shifts. It’s certainly an exciting time to be in the industry and even more exciting to be a developer because Wi-Fi 6 is for developers.

Wi-Fi 6 enables new applications

Let’s look at how Wi-Fi 6 enables new applications and developers. If we look back over time, every major networking technology transition brought with it a new set of capabilities and applications. There was a time when you couldn’t imagine sending voice over an IP network, then came converged IP networks. There was a time when you couldn’t imagine streaming video to your phone or high-definition video to your home, then came 3G and HDTV.

Make no mistake … we are at a similar major network leap with Wi-Fi 6. Developers should start building applications now to get ready for the next wave of connectivity that will become widely available in the next one or two years.

How Wi-Fi  6 Works

Wi-Fi 6, or 802.11ax, represents a major step forward over the current version of WiFi, 802.11ac, because of several technology advancements. Let’s geek out for a minute to understand them.

Wi-Fi 6 enables unified operations and pervasive segmentation across the entire network.

First, there is the move from OFDM to OFDMA. 802.11ac uses OFDM – orthogonal frequency division multiplexing – where an access point sends all the data to one client at a time using the entire frequency band. If an access point wants to send data to different clients, it transmits the data in different time intervals.

Wi-Fi 6 uses OFDMA – orthogonal frequency division multiple access. With OFDMA, an access point can talk to multiple clients at the same time by allocating different frequencies to different clients. The access point can also trade off how much spectrum it uses to send lower rate or higher rate data streams to the different clients according to their data needs. Essentially, it provides a more efficient use of frequency and time to get better performance.

Another advancement is the move from carrier sense multiple access to scheduling. In 802.11ac, access points and clients use a “listen before talk” protocol to look for an opening to transmit data and can face collisions when they start to talk. Wi-Fi 6 uses “scheduling” at the access point for downlink and uplink communications with all the clients. With scheduling, the access point can avoid collisions and fill up every time slot with transmission opportunities, so it doesn’t waste time without transmissions.

Wi-Fi 6 also offers significant power savings in the client. Instead of a client’s radio being on all the time to listen for a packet, the access point can let the client know what its Target Wakeup Time is, so the client can put its radio to sleep until that time. This enables a new set of IoT sensors that can go without a battery change for years, and that unlocks new application possibilities.

So, what does this all mean?

With OFDMA, scheduling, target wakeup times, and other technology advances, Wi-Fi 6 supports more clients, which is often called high-density environments; and, it gives them higher throughput, lower latency, and overall improved performance all with more power savings for the clients.

The Opportunity for Wi-Fi 6 Applications

What kinds of new applications does Wi-Fi 6 enable? Let’s look at some possibilities.

A university has thousands of students, and each student is carrying multiple devices. With the higher-density of Wi-Fi 6, all of them could be connected at once, streaming an interactive AR learning app and still experience a quality connection. That changes how we learn and enables new education models.

  A manufacturing plant has robots that work on mission-critical applications. With the higher-density and power savings enabled by Wi-Fi 6, we can connect more IoT devices throughout the plant. All these devices and robots can operate with high-performance connections that are secure and reliable.

The new level of connectivity for devices and applications impacts your end-to-end network, all the way from the data center and cloud, to the campus and branch, to the edge, and to the device.

It’s also about connecting Wi-Fi 6 and 5G. It’s important to consider capabilities such as intent-based networking to let you manage and operate your entire network, using automation to drive policy across the network, and assurance to know it’s working as planned. You can build in security and analytics from the network up to applications, users, and devices.

Wi-Fi 6 is programmable, and that means a whole new world of applications and businesses are possible. These changes will happen fast, so application developers and network and IT providers need to get started now to prepare for the future wave.

We are excited to announce a new Wireless Developer Center to help you get started today. Check out our new Wi-Fi 6 developer center for API calls, learning labs, videos and other tools that will help you take advantage of this burgeoning opportunity. Once you have an app ready, you can test it in one of our sandboxes. Be sure to join us at Cisco Live in the DevNet Zone for more hands-on learning opportunities with the DevNet team.

The future is now, and it starts with developers.

Watch Susie Wee, SVP/CTO and Founder of Cisco DevNet and Todd Nightingale, SVP and General Manager of Cisco Meraki, as they announce several new offerings that will allow developers to create a new future where applications meet infrastructure.

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  Join DevNet: access the learning labs, docs, and sandboxes you need for network automation, application development, and security.

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[lisamelendezblog]

Innovation driven by diversity at Lesbians Who Tech San Francisco Summit 2019

Innovation and disruption are marquee words at every tech conference these days. There are lots of ways that tech companies tap into the innovation ecosystem: start-up accelerators, acquisitions, internal innovation challenges, and customer innovation centers. But one sure way to increase the innovation power of an organization is to increase full-spectrum diversity at every level. Innovative ideas begin with a team that has diverse work experiences, different skills, and different perspectives based on race, gender, orientation, ability, and age. One tech conference that shows the kind of innovation that comes with celebrating diverse voices and increasing access to leadership roles in STEM fields is the Lesbians Who Tech (LWT) San Francisco Summit, which Cisco sponsored this year.

In March, I joined a team of twenty Cisco employees at this conference – the sixth event of its kind, which brought together over 6,000 queer women, transgender, and gender-non-conforming individuals to share ideas and experiences, gain new knowledge, and increase the visibility of women and LGBTQ+ people in technology. The conference feels different than any other tech conference. The speaker list featured 50% women of color, 20% black or Latinx, and 10% gender non-conforming or transgender—possibly the most diverse speaking body in the world. There were lots of high fives, great style, and sessions on everything from disruptive tech and career advancement, to the political debate around data privacy.

This year, I had the honor of speaking in the Future Trends and Innovation category on day two of the summit. Alongside stories of drone-operated search and rescue to next generation vehicle automation, I shared how Cisco is exploring blockchain technology to address the challenges of ethical mineral sourcing for all the components that go into our products. This project began as a collaboration between the Cisco Hyper Innovation Living Lab, Cisco Supply Chain Sustainability, Cisco Security and Trust, and our customers—a truly diverse coalition of stakeholders that brought together different perspectives, resources, and points of view! This type of collaboration across boundaries is a special kind of innovation secret sauce. I was honored to share this Cisco innovation story and to represent Cisco’s LGBTQ+ community at Lesbians Who Tech.

Some of the Cisco family attendees

I am proud to work at a company like Cisco where innovation, positive social impact, and celebration of our diversity is supported and encouraged. I am proud to be part of the PRIDE Employee Resource Organization that sponsored such an amazing, inclusive event like Lesbians Who Tech, where I see people like me changing the face of our industry. Diversity and inclusion accelerate innovation, and Cisco’s commitment to it make Cisco a great place to work.

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[lisamelendezblog]

Third Time is a Charm at IETF Hackathon in Prague

Moving IETF Standards forward

IETF 104 in Prague featured what was by far the biggest and most successful IETF Hackathon ever. The first IETF Hackathon was in March 2015 at IETF 92 in Dallas. The goals at that time were twofold:

advance the pace and relevance of IETF standards

attract more developers and young people into the IETF

That first hackathon had roughly 40 participants working on 6 projects related to a few selected IETF working groups. Fast forward to this hackathon, March 2019 in Prague, where we had nearly 400 people working on over 40 projects that touched on practically everything the IETF does.

This was the third time the IETF has been to Prague since the hackathon started. The first time was IETF 93 in July 2015. That first hackathon in Prague had around 100 participants working on 15 projects, roughly doubling in size from the one just 4 months prior. This confirmed the hackathon experiment as a success and paved the way for it to become an integral part of each IETF meeting ever since. The second hackathon in Prague was at IETF 99 in July 2017, where we had nearly 200 participants working on 28 projects, effectively doubling in size yet again. More importantly, the hackathon had become integrated into the workflow of most IETF working groups. So perhaps it should not have come as a surprise when this most recent and third hackathon in Prague doubled in size yet again. Many things have changed to accommodate this tremendous growth, but the overall spirit and goals have remained the same.

Veterans and newcomers work together

IETF hackathons are collaborative events with a shared goal of moving IETF work forward. Commemorative t-shirts and laptop stickers are prized takeaways from the event. IETF veterans work side by side with newcomers, exchanging ideas and collaborating on code. This is a great way for newcomers, especially developers interested in networking, security, and other IETF technologies, to have a welcoming experience and start making significant contributions immediately.

“After attending several IETF meetings, I decided to join the hackathon this time, just to see what it’s all about. Besides meeting cool new people with shared interests, I can now wholeheartedly concur that the hackathon is a great and accessible way to ‘get started’ with contributing to a specific draft, or to a working group as a whole. Something that I found quite daunting before, to be honest. It got me so enthusiastic that I’ve been coding on our project throughout the week and on my travels back home, and I’m looking forward to share my contribution in the working group and meet up again at a next hackathon!” – Luuk Hendriks

“I had attended previous IETF meetings, including Hackathons, but it was my first where I was demonstrating my own work — the first public demonstration of an implementation of ILNP (RFCs 6740-6748). I attended with my PhD student, Ryo Yanagida, and it was his first IETF meeting.

It was an excellent event — the Hackathon itself on Saturday and Sunday, and “Hackdemo Happy Hour” on Monday. Ryo and I had lots of people visit us on all three days. They were interested in seeing our demonstration of ILNP mobility-multihoming duality, and it was great to have so many comments, and insightful feedback — both encouragement and constructive criticism. We also found some bugs in our code, which was also useful — things to fix and improve! We also got a chance to see what others in the community were working on.

Ryo and I came along with our own testbed (shipped from the UK), and so I needed some assistance setting up for the Hackathon and the “Hackdemo Happy Hour.” I am grateful to the Hackathon organizers for how approachable, friendly, helpful, and professional you all were in assisting me with my slightly unusual requirements. Very much appreciated, many thanks to you all. I look forward to future IETF Hackathons!” – Saleem Bhatti

Insights gained during the hackathon are brought back into working group meetings that run throughout the following week. This accelerates the standardization process and leads to better standards that are more complete, more precise, and easier to implement.

“The Network Time Protocol (NTP) working group had been struggling to make progress on a Network Time Security specification for a number of years. The IETF hackathons have been very effective at providing focus and building momentum for this effort. We started at IETF 101 hackathon, where we were able to demonstrate a couple of initial prototype implementations to provide initial validation for the specification. By the IETF 104 hackathon, we were able to demonstrate successful interoperability between four independent implementations. We had as many remote participants as we had locally in Prague, and with the final tweaks to the specification incorporated, we are now ready to move forward with it.” – Karen O’Donoghue

More information about all the projects at the hackathon can be found on the hackathon wiki. At the end of the hackathon, teams gave brief presentations summarizing what they achieved and sharing lessons learned with the rest of the IETF community. These presentations are available via the IETF Hackathon GitHub.

Cisco DevNet sponsored and ran the first several hackathons and continue to be big hackathon supporters. Oracle sponsored the hackathon at IETF 104 in Prague. We welcome and encourage additional sponsors for future hackathons to ensure it remains a free event accessible to everyone. The next IETF hackathon is at IETF 105, in Montreal, July 20-21. I hope to see you there.

Join DevNet: access the learning labs, docs, and sandboxes you need for network automation, application development, and security.

  * Photos thanks to © Stonehouse Photographic / Internet Society

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[lisamelendezblog]

Highly accurate test reveals recurring prostate cancer

After being treated for prostate cancer, some men will experience a rise in PSA levels suggesting that new tumors lurk somewhere in the body. Finding these tiny cancerous deposits before they grow and spread any further is crucially important. But it’s also a challenge, since the budding tumors might be too small to see with standard tools such as magnetic resonance imaging.

Now scientists in California have published results with an experimental imaging technique that detects recurring prostate cancer with high accuracy. Importantly, some of the unveiled tumors were “still curable with targeted radiation therapy,” said Dr. Thomas Hope, a radiologist at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, who led the study. “That’s what makes the research so exciting.”

How the test works

The technique used in the study is a modified form of positron emission tomography, or PET scanning. When performing a PET scan, doctors will first give an intravenous injection of a minimally radioactive tracer that travels through the bloodstream and attaches to proteins on cancer cells. The PET scanning technology detects this radiation, and thus allows specially trained experts to see where the cancer cells are located.

Two tracers have been approved so far by the FDA for use in prostate cancer diagnostics: one called choline C11 and another called fluciclovine-18-F. Dr. Hope’s team, however, used an alternative tracer called gallium-68, which has yet to win regulatory approval in the United States. Gallium-68 has the advantage of binding specifically to a protein called prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA), which is highly expressed on metastatic cells.

During the study, USCF researchers and their colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles enrolled 635 men with rising PSA levels after prostate cancer treatment. The men were each injected with gallium-68, and then given a whole-body PET scan. Importantly, the images were interpreted by independent readers who had no other knowledge of a patient’s clinical status.

What it found

Gallium-68 PET scans produced positive results in 75% of the men, and the likelihood of a positive hit grew as their PSA levels increased. For instance, 38% of men with PSA levels of 0.5 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL) or less were flagged by PET scanning, compared to 97% of the men with PSA levels of 5 ng/mL or higher.

The test’s positive predictive value (PPV) — meaning the probability that it would correctly identify existing cancer — ranged between 84% and 92%. According to Dr. Hope, PET scans from the pelvic lymph nodes had the highest PPVs, while scans of the lower ribs, which are prone to features that mimic cancer, had the lowest.

“As we gain more experience with gallium-68/PSMA scanning, we’ll lower the false positive rate and increase the test’s accuracy even further,” said Dr. Hope, who is now working with UCLA on efforts to win FDA approval for the tracer.

According to Dr. Marc Garnick, Gorman Brothers Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and editor in chief of HarvardProstateKnowledge.org, the incremental value added by gallium-68/PSMA scanning still needs further research. “Comparative cost considerations will also be a determining factor to its overall utilization if and when it is approved,” he said.

The post Highly accurate test reveals recurring prostate cancer appeared first on Harvard Health Blog.

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[lisamelendezblog]

“Spark Joy” With New 12.0 Email Security Features & Videos

When you see “software update available,” does it spark joy? For many of us, the answer is a resounding “no.” But, don’t be fooled into thinking that our new 12.0 release of Cisco Email Security is anything other than extraordinary. Here are three reasons why:

Our SVP of Product Management, Jeff Reed, puts it best: “It’s our biggest update in years.” We’ve poured resources into our Cisco Email Security product and it shows in a release that’s full of new features that directly impact our customers’ biggest pain points.

Cisco’s 12.0 release is threat focused. From the ground up, this release aims to arm organizations against common threats like phishing and business email compromise. As the frequency of email threats continue to rise, our customers can be confident that we continue to improve our security technology with updates to Sender Domain Reputation and External Threat Feeds (ETF).

We’re investing in the user experience. 12.0 for Security Management Appliance introduces Cisco’s next generation user interface and drives administrative intuition forward. A quicker UI, easy-to-read reporting summaries, and the continued trusted results makes it easier than ever to have an integrated approach to your email security posture.

Ready to dive into our latest release? We’ve compiled several resources to help you realize the value of these updates. First, the Release Notes for 12.0 for Email Security and the Release Notes for 12.0 for SMA include what’s new in the release and provides an easy-to-use guide to updating your software. Next, be sure to check out these videos below for a more in depth look at our most noteworthy features:

How-Tos

New to 12.0 is our How-Tos Widget.  This contextual widget provides in-app assistance to users in the form of walkthroughs to accomplish configuration and administrative steps within Cisco Email Security.  This video provides a brief walkthrough of this useful new tool.

External Threat Feeds

We’re excited—this release includes External Threat Feeds (ETF), which support STIX/TAXII. If you’re looking to take advantage of integrating external threat information,  this video walks through how you can add third-party threat feeds into your appliance and configuration.

Sender Domain Reputation (SDR)

Cisco SDR is our next level of providing a reputation verdict for email messages based on a sender’s domain and other attributes.  How does SDR work? This video explains how the reputation of an email is collected and what impact it has on email security.

    DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE)

DANE adds additional ability to our encryption capabilities in Cisco Email Security.  This video dives into the new DANE features and explains how to configure it.

  Smart Licensing

Why consider using a smart license? It’s easier to control usage, simplifies maintenance and eliminates the need for right-to-use licensing.

Once you are up to speed on what our 12.0 release can do for you, the final step is to upgrade!  After, be sure to reference the 12.0 User Guide for in-depth administration and further questions regarding services and configuration.

For even more email security resources, be sure to check our Cisco Email Security page regularly for whitepapers, analyst reports, videos and more.

“Spark Joy” With New 12.0 Email Security Features & Videos published first on https://brightendentalhouston.tumblr.com/

[lisamelendezblog]

Five Easy Steps to Selling SD-WAN

There is always a lot of innovation coming out of Cisco, and most of that innovation is ideal for our 2-tier (2T) partners to take to their customers. But the downside of leading innovation – if there is a downside – is that it can get confusing. I’m here to help as a 2T partner advocate.

In fact, we’ve put together a series of Vlogs to help you understand how to position our innovation to your customers, what programs you can access from Cisco, and where to find resources. We call the series The Fast Five. The first in this series is about SD-WAN.

Watch the short video and you’ll learn what the Fast Five are and how to take advantage of the SD-WAN opportunity. Learn how your business goals can be accelerated by selling Cisco SD-WAN.

The SD-WAN market is coming at us fast. Sixty percent of the SD-WAN decisions will be made this year, and Cisco has 80 percent of the router install base out there, that’s 1.1M+ ISRs. Taking SD-WAN to these customers is the easiest way to boost your recurring revenue business.

How do you start the conversation with your customers? With SD-WAN, your customers can easily connect any user to any application across any cloud with superior, comprehensive security. You won’t find that anywhere else. There is a lot more to tell your customers, and Cisco is offering programs and resources to help.

I sat down with Joe Aronow from the Product Architectures team at Cisco Meraki. We laid out all you need to know to get started in the SD-WAN market. I encourage you to take a few minutes to watch this first installment of The Fast Five Vlog series.

Once you have a handle on the key items you need to know to boost your revenues with SD-WAN, here are the links that will help you follow up on this great opportunity:

SD-WAN Sales Connect Hub

SD-WAN Partner Playbook

Dynamic Offers – Umbrella

dCloud Demos

Partner Marketing Central

Finally, stay tuned for more. As I mentioned this is just the beginning of this Vlog series. Let me know what you think in the comments section. I look forward to hearing your feedback, and to bringing you the next video!

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[lisamelendezblog]

The Future is Now! Presenting the Cisco Catalyst 9100 Wi-Fi 6 Access Points

When I was a kid, the future meant flying cars and everyone wearing the same silver jumpsuits. It’s been a few years since I was a kid and while I may not own a flying car, but I don’t have to wear a jumpsuit and working at Cisco allows me to check out all of new innovations that we bring to the world.

With the launch of our newest Catalyst 9100 Access Points, we’re continuing our journey to bring Intent-based Networking to our customers—we’re bringing the future to now. The Catalyst 9100 Access Points are the new addition to the Catalyst family and they’re also our first access points that adhere to Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard.

A lot of people have been talking about the future of the network. You may have seen Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins present at this year’s MWC in Barcelona or perhaps you tuned in to our Virtual Event announcing our new Wi-Fi 6 innovations a few days ago.

I know that you’re thinking that this is just another access point that’s meeting another standard, this isn’t flying-car news. And you’re right, it won’t bring you a flying car, but these new devices have greater bandwidth, a more dependable connection to the network and features that will continue to automate your network. These new features are going to allow for a lot of really great uses–and in a lot of ways, that’s better.

How so? How about things such as robots and advanced virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR).

Like some of you, one of my all-time favorite TV shows is the Simpsons. There was a classic episode where Lisa dreamt of the perfect school and in that dream, her teacher told her to put on her virtual reality helmet and travel back in time to days of Genghis Khan. Thanks to the Catalyst 9100 Access Points and the increased bandwidth and strong connection, this won’t be a cartoon fantasy anymore. Students are able to learn by literally immersing themselves in their studies. Whether it’s using AR to go back thousand and reliving a historical battle or delving into a scientific study.

The VR and Wi-Fi 6 partnership isn’t just for pointy haired, second grade geniuses either. Surgeons can employ VR to work on patients at a hospital on the other side of the world. This means that geography and time will no longer be the deciding factors on whether patients get the treatment they need.

To make use of this new technology, you’re going to need a reliable, scalable and secure wireless network that can handle the additional number of devices and the data that they’re going to create. That’s where the Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points comes in. These access points are your first step to creating that robust network needed to handle the crush of devices and applications connecting to your network.

Here are some things you can expect:

• Enhanced features: Cisco RF ASIC delivers CleanAir, Wireless Intrusion Prevention System (WIPS), Dual Filter DFS in addition to Fast Locate and off-channel RRM, which will be available in future releases. The Cisco Catalyst 9100 access points also support Target Wake Time, which is a new power-saving mode allowing the client to stay asleep and to wake at prescheduled times to exchange data with the access point. The energy savings over 802.11n and 802.11ac is significant, with up to three to four times the older standards. In addition, this improves power and battery efficiency in end devices like smartphones, tablets and IOT devices.

• Addresses the growing IoT explosion: The Cisco Catalyst 9100 access points provide multi-lingual support and application hosting of IoT protocols such as Wi-Fi, BLE and Zigbee. IoT is more than lights, heating and security cameras. From life-saving medical equipment in hospitals to restocking robots—I told you that there would be robots!—in retail to heavy machinery in manufacturing, all of these devices are considered IoT. Everything is connected and since some of these devices are literally the difference between life and death, they must be always-on. Making sure that this equipment doesn’t have downtime is paramount.

• Customizable with a programable RF ASIC: The Catalyst 9120 access point has custom RF ASIC and provides real-time analytics. When combined with Cisco DNA Assurance allows you to gain RF intelligence and visibility that can be analyzed and used to run your network more efficiently. The custom RF ASIC also has a dedicated third radio that is automatically enabled during high density scenarios. This goes along with delivering other features such as RF Interference mitigation and rogue detection.

• Reliability: always-connected, always dependable; a seamless experience. The Catalyst 9100 access points have improved roaming features allowing a better Wi-Fi experience. Add Spectrum Intelligence and Interference and Rogue Detection to the reliability mix and you can be sure that your network is clear of any issues that will hinder a seamless connection.

• Capacity: Thanks to Wi-Fi 6, there is a reduced latency with 100+ devices communicating at the same time. The Catalyst 9100 access points will also provide support in the future for both OFDMA and MU-MIMO to help to dole out application resources. OFDMA is ideal for low-bandwidth applications and increases efficiency while reducing latency. For high-bandwidth applications, MU-MIMO increases capacity resulting in higher speeds per user. Look at MU-MIMO as multiple trucks serving users simultaneously, while OFDMA is one truck serving each user.

The new Catalyst 9100 access points are poised to take your infrastructure to the next level. And with more devices being added to the network every day, this next level is where you’re going to need to be.

The future is much closer than you think. Outfitting your infrastructure is the best way of bringing the future to now.

For more information, click here.

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[lisamelendezblog]

Baby boomers and hepatitis C: What’s the connection?

Hepatitis C is a viral infection that is spread through contact with infected blood. Hepatitis C infection can be short-term (acute) or long-term (chronic). Most people with acute hepatitis C eventually develop chronic hepatitis C.

Hepatitis C usually does not cause symptoms, which is why most people with hepatitis C don’t know that they are infected. Left untreated, hepatitis C can lead to cirrhosis, liver cancer, and liver failure.

Why screen baby boomers for hepatitis C?

Why are we recommending screening of adults in the baby boomer generation? To understand this, it’s worth reviewing how we got here.

In 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) established HCV testing guidelines based on the presence of risk factors. These included receipt of blood transfusions prior to 1992, when blood donations began to be screened for HCV; receipt of clotting factors before 1987; hemodialysis (a process that filters the blood when the kidneys are not working properly); and injection drug use. However, not many cases of hepatitis C were diagnosed. This could likely be traced to a combination of doctors not being adequately engaged, and patients in denial of their risky behaviors.

To identify more cases, the CDC jettisoned its old approach and moved to a blanket recommendation to screen all adults born between 1945 and 1965, the baby boomers. The rationale for this was that more than three out of every 100 baby boomers were infected with HCV. This was at least five times higher than in any other group of adults, and accounted for about 75% of HCV cases.

Moreover, the diagnosis of HCV in this group would identify those with long-duration chronic disease, who were at risk for the most advanced forms of liver disease. So in 2012, the CDC and United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) formally recommended that all baby boomers get a one-time blood test to check for HCV. (The guidelines also continue to recommend that those at high risk for other reasons be screened.)

Why is the prevalence of HCV so high among baby boomers? Risk factor assessments suggest that this group may have been more likely to engage in occasional or ongoing injection drug use during young adulthood, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s.

Hepatitis C screening is now more important than ever

HCV screening is more important than ever. Why? First, it is critical that we identify everyone with chronic HCV because they are at increased risk for early death due to liver disease. There is also mounting evidence that chronic hepatitis C is associated with increased risk for diseases outside the liver, including heart and kidney disease, as well as diabetes. In addition, recent dramatic advances in antiviral therapy allow us to cure the vast majority of HCV infections using short courses of well-tolerated oral medications.

Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) has committed to a global effort to reduce new cases of HCV infection by 90%, and to reduce HCV-related mortality by 65% by 2030. To be sure, this goal can only be accomplished if we identify cases of existing HCV infection. Some countries are on track to achieve this target, and have done so by enacting widespread population screening campaigns coupled with access to antiviral therapy. We can and must do better with screening in the United States if we’re to come close to the WHO’s goals.

The post Baby boomers and hepatitis C: What’s the connection? appeared first on Harvard Health Blog.

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[lisamelendezblog]

Getting to Know the Real Cisco

I often get asked how I got to work at the largest networking company without having any background in networking. In fact, I never thought I would work for Cisco because I didn’t think that they specialized in areas that interested me – particularly Programming, Neuroscience, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Well, it turned out that was not entirely true…

I am currently a proud Cisco Systems Engineer focusing on our Security portfolio, with a slight preference for Cloud Security. I am programming almost every week, to provide samples for customers or other purposes, and I am also actively involved with some of the Security activities from DevNet, which is Cisco’s developer network. I constantly feel invigorated and excited by our global community.

But how did I get here? It all started with a risk.

During my studies, I was asked to interview for an Associate Systems Engineer role in the Cisco Traineeship. To prepare for these interviews, I forced myself to do a crash course in Computer Networking on YouTube, since I did not have a background in this.

What I did have was a Major in Neurosciences with a Minor in Computer Science. I then received my Master’s in Information Sciences. During my Master Thesis I created an algorithm that can automatically summarize texts, which had almost nothing to do with computer networking. My passion for programming started at a very early age when my Grandfather (who was a researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratories) introduced me NetLogo (a graphical agent-based programming framework). My father was also a programmer, which fueled my interest even further.

Throughout my education, I came across the words “Switch” and “Router” from time to time, but this was not part of any exam I had ever taken previously. My passion was the Human Brain (associating brain processes with behavior) and Programming (Data Science and AI) – and I just didn’t think Cisco was a company that shared those same passions.

But, still. I thought it would be a good idea to get to know Cisco further – so, I interviewed.

The interview process for a traineeship at Cisco was tough but I was pleasantly surprised when the interviewers asked me questions about Programming, AI, and Neuroscience! This is where my view on Cisco changed forever as I was told that Cisco is not just a networking hardware company – but that the company heavily focuses on Software, AI, and Machine Learning too!

The interviews went well, and I couldn’t have been more excited to accept the Cisco Traineeship at the Amsterdam office when the call finally came. During my traineeship I was able to quickly ramp up my Networking skills through the CCNA and CCNP certifications, while still focusing on other topics like Programming as well. Cisco encouraged me to pursue my interests and develop my career in a way that excited me as an employee.

Now that I look back, I can say that I am very happy that I took the risk and leap of faith to join a company from which I initially thought differently. It was intense and exciting to do these interviews, but it feels very rewarding to know that I made the right decision back then, and that I continue to excel in my career now.

What I have learned is that you can mold your job at Cisco to whatever you want it to be. There are many paths here at Cisco, and the company really wants you to find your strengths and own them.

For example, it does not state in my contract that I have to do any programming with our Security products. It also does not sate that I have to provide sample code to customers. I am given the flexibility to do so, and I very much enjoy accomplishing these tasks.

I think that effort creates very diverse teams at Cisco, where everyone can use their own background to work towards a common goal. If I look at my team, I can definitely see that in action on any given day.

Through this experience, I have learned that you should always explore the opportunities outside of your comfort zone. By doing so you force yourself into learning something new. Four years ago, I would never have expected myself to be a Systems Engineer focusing on Cyber Security – but here I am, and it all started with a little bit of risk and taking a chance to get to know the real Cisco.

Interested in Security, Cloud, Collaboration, and Software? We are too! Apply now.

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[lisamelendezblog]

Wi-Fi 6 Will Help Power the 5G Era’s Positive Impact on Jobs, Economies, and Peoples’ Quality of Life

Yesterday, Cisco announced its first series of new Wi-Fi products based on the 6thgeneration Wi-Fistandard: Wi-Fi 6. Just like 5G is a sea change for cellular radio technology that goes beyond faster download speeds, Wi-Fi 6 is about so much more than simply enabling more data. Though data hungry users out there can rest assured that there will be a higher throughput of 3-4 times that of previous generations.

For the first time, Wi-Fi will be able to deliver SLA quality of experience even when a high number of users are connected to the network ensuring a reliable high definition connection for your video conference call or to enabling you to share through social media your favourite football player’s latest goal whilst you are sat in the stadium. Wi-Fi 6’s new capabilities also mean Wi-Fi can support a much broader set of use cases for instance in the IoT space with hundreds of devices per access point reliably connected for low latency and other QoS parameters as relevant.

With these new capabilities Wi-Fi 6 will be a key technology enabler for digitisation of enterprises and vertical industries on par with 5G. 51% of all global IP traffic (fixed and mobile) will be from Wi-Fi in 2022 with more traffic to be offloaded onto Wi-Fi networks from mobile devices than will stay on mobile networks (59%, up from 54% in 2017). As such Wi-Fi and cellular technologies will continue to be complementary and integrate even further providing users with seamless connectivity whether they are at home, work or in transit.

For policy-makers and regulators working to unlock these benefits of Wi-Fi 6 and 5G, this means looking beyond the world of licenced spectrum and equally ensuring unlicensed spectrum for Wi-Fi to ensure the full set of technologies are available to service providers, enterprises and public sector as they look to digitise.

It also means looking at the broadest range of technologies to bring connectivity to all citizens. As we are ushering into the zettabyte and 5G era it is more important than ever that we close the digital divide and design policy to support ubiquitous coverage of high capacity networks. That both includes policies to incentivise private investments as well as measures to ensure rural coverage where the market will not deliver on its own, including through public private partnerships.

Cisco is, for instance, already engaging in partnership with governments and other industry partners in projects such as 5G RuralFirst, demonstrating the potential of 5G and IoT in rural test beds. In another project together with Google, we are using Wi-Fi hotspots to connect communities with limited connectivity around the world to enable them to benefit from the social and economic opportunities of the digital economy.

We’re excited by these new developments and we look forward to be part of the conversations with policy-makers and regulators on creating the regulatory frameworks that keeps us enabling innovation globally.

Wi-Fi 6 Will Help Power the 5G Era’s Positive Impact on Jobs, Economies, and Peoples’ Quality of Life published first on https://brightendentalhouston.tumblr.com/