Norwegian Aluminum Plants Hit by Cyber-Attack

19 March 2019 one Norwegian aluminum firm name Hydro became the latest victim of cyber attack. As a safety measure digital systems at the firm’s smelting plants has been turned off. Firm inform in a press briefing –  that the IT systems in most business areas are impacted and they are still running their investigation about the attack.

A local source reported that the cyber-attack was caused by a relatively new form of ransomware known as LockerGoga, but the plant’s official did not comment on this.

For now the plant had to switched to manual operations. Hydro is also getting help from Norway’s state cyber-security agency to resolve this issue.

Osaka Metro Websites Offline After Translation Errors

Osaka metro’s network had to temporarily put their foreign language site offline – after an unusual problem on 19 March 2019. The website’s user notice the English translation was not correct. As a result “Sakai Muscle” and “Osaka Metro” became the Japanese hashtags trend.

Some of the errors are-
“Sakaisuji” translated as “Sakai muscle”.
“Dobutsuen-mae” translated as “Before the Zoo”.
“Daikokucho” translated as “Powerhouse Town”.
“Taishibashi-Imaichi” translated as “Prince Bridge Now City”.
“Tengachaya” translated as “World Teahouse”.
Microsoft translation program is use to translate metro’s all non-Japanese pages.

To be on the safe side the Chinese, Korean and Thai language website also has been taken offline to avoid confusion.In the mean time as a temporary solution visitors to the English language page are automatically redirected to the main Japanese site.

Facebook, Instagram Down for 14 Hours

Facebook, Instagram were down for almost 14 Hours starting on late March 13 and ended 14 March. According to Facebook’s status page – the outage started on Wednesday (Eastern Time) 11am. The outage impact it’s user from posting or login in to Facebook. But Facebook confirmed – that it was not a DDoS attack.It was actually a server configuration change that started the problem.

The whole time Facebook and Instagram ware updating their users with latest information through Twitter.

What is DDoS Attack ?

DDoS OR Distributed Denial of Service is a cyber-attack. It targets websites and online services.The attacker overwhelm the target (websites OR online services) with more traffic than the server or network can accommodate. As a result the intended users of the website/online-services cannot access them properly.

Uganda and Social Media Tax

July 2018 Uganda’s finance minister David Bahati imposed tax on daily internet uses.  His action take affects more than 60 online platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter. To use those sites, peoples or Uganda are expected to pay a tax of 200 Ugandan shillings a day. His original reason was to tackle the online “idle talk” and raise revenue for the government.

Now the latest data shows – the internet subscriptions to such sites and services fell by more than 2.5 million and internet based business are suffering.

Stem Cell Transplant Cures a Man From AIDS Virus

Stem cell transplant cures a man from AIDS virus. The report was published online by the “Nature”. The patient was diagnosed with HIV in 2003 and he was taking HIV control drugs. Then he developed Hodgkin lymphoma (type of cancer). in 2016 he had a stem cell transplant to cure his cancer.

He was lucky – as his doctor found donor who has a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to HIV (only 1 per cent of people descended from northern Europe have inherited this mutation from both parents. And they are immune to most HIV). After that he stop taking the HIV control drug and after 18 months of transfer there is no trace of the virus.

This is a  dangerous procedure and have failed in other patients. Timothy Ray Brown of USA was the first successful patients who was treated with this therapy. He also known as the “Berlin patient,”