The Three Major Security Threats in Healthcare Essay Example for Free

The Three Major Security Threats in Healthcare Essay Nowadays Doctors and Nurses has several mobile devices in order to provide patient care. Virtualization is very important in providing adequate and affordable patient care in the rural health industry. Attempts to breach security happen every day in our agency. Preventing cyber-attacks and security breaches is a never ending battle in network security. Introduction I am an IT professional focusing on network security in the healthcare industry. Every day we monitor the network for phishing/pharming, DoS attacks, Trojans, and other security breaches. Mobile Devices, virtualization and lackadaisical end-users are the biggest threats to network security. Mobile Devices An article in GCN says it best, â€Å"Mobile devices are ubiquitous in todays society, and the number and types of devices used by physicians, nurses, clinicians, specialists, administrators and staff – as well as patients and visitors – is growing at healthcare agencies across the country.† Nowadays Doctors and Nurses has several mobile devices in order to provide patient care. Cellphones, laptops, and tablets are of the norm. I can’t remember the last time I had a doctor’s visit and the doctor didn’t update my chart using a laptop or tablet. All of these wireless devices make the network vulnerable. In my opinion wireless security has always been the hardest part of the network to protect because there isn’t a physical connection that can be monitored. End-users don’t always use secure passwords or they share passwords. At our agency an employee is not allowed to bring in a mobile device other than a personal cellphone to the workplace in order to reduce security breaches. â€Å"The Office of Management and Budget, Personal Identity Verification cards had been issued to 3.75 million federal employees as of Dec. 1, 2010, or 80 percent of the government workforce, and to 76 percent of contractors who are eligible to use the cards, about 885,000 contractors.† My agency uses Personal Identity Verification or PIV cards to gain access to wired devices on the network unfortunately that is not the case for wireless devices. Although we have two-party authentication in place for all devices it would be nice to have tertiary layer such as a smart card or PIV card for wireless devices. I don’t foresee a solution happening for a few years due to the cost in an already financially burdened healthcare system. It is true that â€Å"a reliance on off-the-shelf products means that there will be no PIV card readers available for workers signing on to check e-mail or read a document while out of the office.† Virtualization The agency I work for specializes in rural healthcare therefore often they don’t have the equipment or the staffing to complete tasks such as reading X-rays, providing behavioral health etc. Over the years we have had to implement Telehealth in order to meet these requirements. A patient in rural Minnesota may have his or her x-rays read by a physician in Billings, Montana. An individual may have weekly counseling sessions with a psychiatrist that is 500 miles away. Nowadays most healthcare companies use electronic health records to access patient information. Denial of Service DoS attacks happen when a hacker manages to overload a server to render it useless. A DoS attack is prevalent and damaging in virtualized environments and can preventsthe physicians and nurses from retrieving a patient’s information. If they are unable to access patient history to include what medications they are on or what they may be allergic to etc then they are unable to provide or give the wrong patient care which could be deadly. Therefore virtualization is very important in providing adequate and affordable patient care in the rural health industry. End-Users Our agency has mandatory computer security and security training every year in an effort to preempt attacks on the network. This mandatory training is required to be taken by every employee including the IT department. Attempts to breach security happen every day in our agency. Although we have security measures in place we have to constantly educate our end users on how to handle suspicious activity, password safety etc. Unfortunately there is always that one person that opens a suspicious email or shares their password or loses their token or PIV card and they don’t report it. This makes the network vulnerable. I have always believed that end users are a company’s biggest security risk. Allowing end users to access social media, personal email etc can allow for viruses to infect PC’s server’s etc. Once a virus is in the network it will spread like wildfire which will cripple the network. Prevention We use a lot of tools to constantly monitor the network to prevent DoS attacks, viruses, packet sniffing, phishing etc. We have implemented Websense as a means of policing what websites an end-user can surf to. We have firewalls in place to prevent end-users as well as outsiders from having access to IP ranges on our network as well as outside the network. We use access list on the routers as another layer of protection. We have penetration testers in our department whose only purpose is to look for packet sniffing and holes in the network. We have another group that monitor’s suspicious activity on the network such as a spike in bandwidth or an IP that is sending or receiving a large amount of information for specific length of time. Preventing cyber-attacks and security breaches is a never ending battle in network security. Conclusion Healthcare news states that â€Å"†¦Healthcare is driving the need for network security solutions that can cover multiple types of devices and infrastructure components.† Although we are largely driven by the Federal Communications Commission and HIPPAA my department is constantly implementing new devices and measures to secure the network and protect patient and employee information. This takes constant training and a lot of due diligence to accomplish that goal. References Are mobile devices already making PIV cards obsolete? Retrieved on October 13, 2013 from http://gcn.com/articles/2011/03/11/piv-status-update.aspx PIV Cards are in the hands of most federal employees and contractors, Retrieved on October 13, 2013 from http://gcn.com/articles/2011/03/11/piv-status-update.aspx Top Five Security Threats in Healthcare, Retrieved on October 14, 2013 from http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/top-5-security-threats-healthcare

Ancient Olympics Essay -- essays research papers fc

History of the Ancient Olympic Games The Ancient Greek Olympics were not only sporting events, it was a celebration to honor the great and powerful Zeus. The Ancient Olympics were held every four years at the famous Olympia, a district of Elis, here all free Greek men were allowed to compete. The first record of the Olympic Games was held in 776 B.C. The main sports were the Pentathlon, the Equestrian Events, Pankration, and Boxing. The Pentathlon was the name for the five events in Greek gymnastics: running, jumping, wrestling, discus throwing, and javelin throwing which began with the 18th Olympiad. In the wrestling event, wrestlers were anointed with oil, dusted with powder, and forbidden to bite or gouge one another. Wrestling was looked upon as a weapon-free military exercise. Since there was no weapons wrestlers that competed used their weight and strength as an advantage especially since there were no weight categories. The Javelin was thrown in the same form back in ancient times as it is thrown today. The first recorded Olympic Games had one event, a race, called the stade which is a measure of the distance of the length of the track. By 724 B.C. a two-length race was added and by 700 B.C. there were longer distance races. By 720 B.C., men participated naked, except in the foot race in armor that weighed between fifty to sixty pounds. The outfit included a helmet, greaves, and a shield that helped young men build speed and stamina in preparation for war. The Pentathlon included three running events such as the Stade, the Diaulos, and the Dolichos. The Stade was a 200 yard foot race, was the first and only Olympic event for 13 Games. The dolichos was a variable length foot race averaging twenty stades or four thousand yards for the fifteenth Olympiad. The Diaulos was a four hundred yard foot race that was instituted for the next Olympic Games. The discus was considered by ancient Greeks, an event of rhythm, precision, and finesse of a competitor to throw the discus was as important as his strength. The discus was made of stone, iron, bronze, or lead, and was shaped like a flying saucer. The Sizes were different for the boys' division, since the boys were not expected to throw the same weighted discus as the men. The athletes who competed in the jump event used lead or stone jump weights called halteres shaped like telephone receivers to increase ... ...rces, but in the historic years their founder is said to be Oxylos whose descendant Ifitos later rejuvenated the games. According to tradition, the Olympic Games began in 776 B.C. when Ifitos made a treaty with Lycourgos the king and famous legislator of Sparta and Cleisthenes the king of Pissa (Coote p. 13). The text of the treaty was written on a disc and kept in the Heraion. In this treaty that was the decisive event for the development of the sanctuary as a Panhellenic centre, the "sacred truce" was agreed, that is to say the ceasing of fighting in the entire Greek world for as long as the Olympic Games were on. As a reward for the victors, the cotinus, which was a wreath made from a branch of wild olive tree that was growing next to the opisthodomus of the temple of Zeus in the sacred Altis, was established after an order of the Delphic oracle. Works Cited Coote, James. A Picture History of the Olympics. London, England: Tom Stacey Limited, 1972. Kristy, Davida. Olympics How the Games Began. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Lerner Publications Company, 1995. Grolier, the Associated Press. The Olympic Story. Danbury, Connecticut: Grolier Enterprises INC., 1979.

Behavioural Issues Within Budgeting Essay

Objectives of Budgeting Through budgeting organisations can provide information for strategic planning and control, these are the two main objectives of the budgetary control system. Management and management accountants must work together and operate a system that achieves these objectives, they do so through a system called variance analysis. Management accountants compare the actual results against the budgets; they then send reports to the management concerning the extent to which budgets are being met. Management can then control activities by making possible steps to stop situations where the budget is being ignored or overlooked. To meet their controlling and planning needs, management and management accountants adapt the feedback and feed-forward principles (types of controls). As well as feedback, budgetary systems consist of feed-forward controls, where expected outcomes can be compared with desired outcomes. A recent report Tayles (1998) suggests that, â€Å"†¦feedforward control consists of a prediction being made of anticipated future outputs. If the expected outputs differ from what outputs are desired, control actions are implemented to minimise these differences. Control is therefore, achieved, if the control actions are effective, before any deviation from the objective output occurs†. Feedback is the detection of a deviation between actual results and an objective; normally this is carried out after the event and is essentially error based. Research has shown that up to date, accurate feedback has a motivational effect, delay and inaccurate data are demotive. Most organisations adopt th ese controls, as they are effective and aid the pursuit of a budgetary control system. Target setting is another objective of budgeting and may possibly have motivational benefits. Setting targets that are realistic and clearly stated will encourage employees to make more effort to achieve it than they might otherwise do. However, the motivational effect of budgetary control is far from clear, as we shall see later in this report. In addition, there is no  point in having targets and controls if they are kept a secret. Through communication, organisations can enhance the level of information that flows from top management to employees (subordinates). These are just some of the arguments for budgeting. The rest of this report will concentrate on the behavioural issues in a budgetary control system. Behavioural Considerations When drafting and planning a budgeting system there are behavioural issues to consider as budgets can have implications for human behaviour and, budgeting can have harmful side effects on performance. There is a danger that employees will concentrate solely on the objectives set by the budget, regardless of whether or not it is organizationally desirable. This means that individuals would set out to exploit the rules of the budgetary control system to boost their individual performance, ignoring other areas not monitored by the control system. Drury (2000, p.600) found that â€Å"†¦actual behaviour may be modified so that desired results appear to be obtained, although they may have been achieved in an undesirable manner which is detrimental to the firm†. In addition, budgets may give management a means of judging the performance of their teams. It’s assumed that, the setting of performance measures should complement the setting of new strategies and objectives and the implementation of action plans for the organisation. However, that adherence to the budget alone cannot measure all aspects of a manager’s performance. Therefore, it is important that managers achieve their targets frequently enough to give positive feedback in their efforts. Another behavioural aspect to consider when introducing a budgetary control system is the controls set by the new system, as these may cause negative attitudes. A potential cause of negative attitudes is the way a control is applied, if targets are considered unachievable and applied too rigorously, they may cause negative attitudes. This may also lead to harmful side effects such as the lack of goal congruence and organisational performance. However, if care is taken in designing the control system negative attitudes may be avoided. Drury (2000, p.601) makes a similar argument, â€Å"The way that  a control system is applied can be just as important as the design issues in determining the success of a control system†. Importance of Behavioural Considerations in the Budgetary Process Participation Interaction of managers and employees or budgetees to the targets that are incorporated in their budgets is known as participation. Tayles (1998) suggests that, â€Å"†¦participation in the budget process and discussion over how results are to be measured has benefits in terms of budget attitude and performance of the budgetee†. This would be of an advantage to an organisation as employees would be more receptive of the targets and more committed to achieving them. In addition, the levels of staff morale would be greater than before. Participation can also improve communications and tends to improve the degree to which budgets are met. For example, participation creates a common understanding of the organisations objectives and makes achieving goals more likely. Communication Communication is a necessary activity in all factors of management and can be broadly defined as an exchange of information to bring about a mutual understanding between two parties. Welsch (1988) Defining or clarifying the lines of communication within an organisation can be a powerful aid in the construction of the budget. Communication can have an important part to play in the budgets objectives, targets and responsibilities throughout the organisation. Carried out properly, this can have considerable benefits in promoting co-operation at all levels. Therefore, in order for an organisation to wok effectively there must be lines of communication so that all parts can de kept fully informed of the part they are expected to play in achieving the budget. This aspect can have important behavioural implications throughout an organisation as the attitude of the person who receives the communication may be affected. Motivation By setting challenging but realistic targets, well-designed budgets can play a significant part in motivating managers and employees to perform in line with the organisational objectives. The targets must be clear and achievable, and the manager should participate in setting his or her own budget, as it is more likely to be acknowledged. Generally, it’s believed for budgets to motivate, higher objectives should be set. The levels of expected performance that are set influence the motivation of managers responsible for target achievement. If levels are set too high, then there is a strong disincentive to management involvement in the budgetary process, and a low level of motivation. It levels are set too low, then managers can achieve targets easily despite inefficiencies. This is known as budgetary slack. Setting appropriate levels of attainment in budgets is a complex and difficult activity with an important behavioural dimension. Therefore, it can be said that motivation is a process of arousing and sustaining goal-directed behaviour induced by the expectation of satisfying individual needs. Goal Congruence Goal congruence means that as people work to achieve their own goals, they also work to achieve the goals of the organisation. Nevertheless, there is a danger that employees will concentrate only on what is been monitored, leading to a lack of goal congruence. Focused on preventing this undesirable behaviour and encouraging goal congruence is controls, for example, action or behavioural controls. Action or behavioural controls involves managers watching employees as they go about there work and if the managers know what actions are desirable (or undesirable) the desired outcomes will come about. Performance measures may be used as a good indicator of what is desirable to achieve an organisations goals and some measure may encourage goal congruence or organisationally desirable behaviour. For this to be effective management must also ensure  that desired actions are taken. Goal Definition A further use of budgets is as a basis for setting performance standards and rewards, for example, bonus, status or enhanced promotion prospects are often linked to budget attainment. This may be defined as a process theory of motivation that focuses on the process of setting goals, Emmanual (1992). It is argued that the natural human preference to set and strive for these goals is useful only if the individual both understands and accepts a particular goal. Therefore fundamental to goal attainment is: *an understanding and acceptance of a particular goal (goal congruence) *skills to achieve the goal *confidence that they have the skills to achieve the goal *a reasonable expectation of achieving that goal People work more efficiently when they have goals and targets. Therefore, if the targets are agreed and accepted by individuals, they should achieve goal congruence and motivation. Conclusion It will be apparent from this report that budgets serve various purposes and in some cases, these purposes can be in conflict and have a consequent effect on management and employee behaviour. Nevertheless, if controls are put in place that focuses on preventing undesirable behaviour, employees of an organisation would be discouraged from taking part in such actions. Budgets serve as a means of forecasting, planning, control and a channel of  communication and motivation. But, a good budgetary system should be designed to: *meet the objectives regarded as most important by senior management *provide information which is useful in meeting those objectives *Reduce the risk of unintended and undesirable behaviours. REFERENCES Drury, C. (2000) Management & Cost Accounting, 5th edition, Thomson Learning Emmanual, C. Otley, D. Merchant, K. (1992) Readings in Accounting for Management Control, Chapman & Hall Tayles, M. (01 Dec 1998) budgetary control – the organisational aspects Available at: www.acca.com [Accessed 7 April 2002] Welsch, G.A. Hilton, R.W. Gordon, P.N. (1988) Budgeting – Profit Planning and Control, 5th edition, Prentice Hall

Stereographic Photography

Stereographs were a very popular form of photography in the 19th century. Using a special camera, photographers would take two nearly identical images which, when printed side by side, would appear as a three dimensional image when viewed through a set of special lenses called a stereoscope. Millions of stereoview cards were sold and a stereoscope kept in the parlor was a common entertainment item for decades. Images on the cards ranged from portraits of popular figures to comical incidents to spectacular scenic views. When executed by talented photographers, stereoview cards could make scenes appear extremely realistic. For example, a stereographic image shot from a tower of the Brooklyn Bridge during its construction, when viewed with the proper lenses, makes the viewer feel as if they are about to step out on a precarious rope footbridge. The popularity of stereoview cards faded by about 1900. Large archives of them still exist and thousands of them can be viewed online. Many historic scenes were recorded as stereo images by noted photographers including Alexander Gardner and Mathew Brady, and scenes from Antietam and Gettysburg can seem particularly vivid when viewed with the proper equipment that shows off their original 3-D aspect. History of Stereographs The earliest stereoscopes were invented in the late 1830s, but it wasn’t until the Great Exhibition of 1851 that a practical method of publishing stereo images was introduced to the public. Throughout the 1850s the popularity of stereographic images grew, and before long many thousands of cards printed with side-by-side images were being sold. Photographers of the era tended to be businessmen fixated on capturing images that would sell to the public. And the popularity of the stereoscopic format dictated that many images would be captured with stereoscopic cameras. The format was especially suited to landscape photography, as spectacular sites such as waterfalls or mountain ranges would appear to jump out at the viewer. In typical use, stereoscopic images would be viewed as parlor entertainment. In an era before films or television, families would experience what it was like to see distant landmarks or exotic landscapes by passing around the stereoscope. Stereo cards were often sold in numbered sets, so consumers could easily buy a series of views related to a particular theme.   Its apparent by viewing vintage stereoscopic images that photographers would try to choose vantage points which would emphasize the 3-dimensional effect. Some photographs that might be impressive when shot with a normal camera can seem thrilling, if not terrifying, when viewed with the full sterescopic effect. Even serious subjects, including very grim scenes shot during the Civil War, were captured as stereoscopic images. Alexander Gardner used a stereoscopic camera when he took his classic photographs at Antietam. When viewed today with lenses that replicate the three-dimensional effect, the images, especially of dead soldiers in poses of rigor mortis, are chilling. Following the Civil War, popular subjects for stereoscopic photography would have been the construction of the railroads in the West, and the construction of landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge. Photographers with stereoscopic cameras made considerable effort to capture scenes with spectacular scenery,   such as Yosemite Valley in California. Stereoscopic photographs even led to the founding of the National Parks. Tales of spectacular landscapes in the Yellowstone region were discounted as rumors or wild tales told by mountain men. In the 1870s stereoscopic images were taken in the Yellowstone region and they were shown to members of Congress. Through the magic of stereoscopic photography skeptical legislators could experience some of the grandeur of Yellowstones majestic scenery, and the argument to preserve the wilderness was thereby strengthened. Vintage stereoscopic cards can be found today at flea markets, antique stores, and online auction sites, and modern lorgnette viewers (which can be purchased through online dealers) make it possible to experience the thrill of 19th century stereoscopes.   Sources: Stereoscopes.  St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, edited by Thomas Riggs, 2nd ed., vol. 4, St. James Press, 2013, pp. 709-711. Brady, Mathew.  UXL Encyclopedia of World Biography, edited by Laura B. Tyle, vol. 2, UXL, 2003, pp. 269-270.   Photography.  Gale Library of Daily Life:  American Civil War, edited by Steven E. Woodworth, vol. 1, Gale, 2008, pp. 275-287.