Using Big Data to Beat Cancer

When I had my first class in Management Information Systems back in my sophomore year of college, one of the most fascinating subjects to me was the concept of Big Data. I understood that the world is constantly producing and collecting more and more data, but I had never thought about the real possibilities of harnessing that data. Just like any other kind of science, researching and analyzing the data that computers allow us to collect can, and have, lead to huge breakthroughs.

The idea of using data to fight cancer first came to my attention when I was having a conversation with my boss about her son, who has been doing just that after graduating from [double check college with Mena]. In simple terms, he is working on a huge, and potentially life-changing project, to analyze the movement and growth of brain cancer cells. His team’s hypothesis is that they will be able to map out where the cancer is most likely to move into and understand the exact rate of growth in the cells when exposed to different forms of treatment. This is being done using an incredible amount of data taken from a sample of people with brain cancer, and could potentially change how all other cancers are researched and treated.

Other promising research projects are those across many countries that are attempting to fully map the human genome. In the US, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs’ is launching the Million Veteran Program (MVP) to create one of the largest databases of genetic research,to learn more about how genes affect health. With these massive efforts worldwide, it is estimated that by 2025 there will be data for as many as 2 billion sequenced human genomes. The expansion of these programs has been in response for a huge demand in medical and genetic data - which has changed how disease and treatment is handled from patient to patient.

The biggest challenge that these efforts are facing is that of freely available, consistent data. Medical data becomes a difficult responsibility due to privacy and consent laws, both nationally and internationally. Data sets are not easily shared on a large scale, and even when they are there is no current standard terms in which data is collected or recorded. According to Nancy Brinker and Elad Gil in their article, “Using Data Science to Beat Cancer”, three things need to happen to crack the medical data nut. Patients need to be able to freely share their data easily with a commonized form, there needs to be more funding for the development of data science and cancer, and simply more data sets need to be generated. These sets also need to focus on all ethnicities and relate to all humans.

While Big Data has become a huge promising star on the horizon of medical research, it is also huge and daunting project to tackle, and no one person, group, company, or country can take it on their own. Maggie Wilcoxon.

Equifax Data Breach

On Thursday, Sept 7th, Equifax reported one of the largest data breaches in history had happened. They reported that up to 143 million Americans may have had their personal information compromised, including social security numbers, and home addresses. Along with that around 209,000 credit card numbers were also exposed. The breach had also spread to the U.K. and Canada. The hack occurred sometime between the middle of May and July. It wasn't discovered until July 29th. The worst part about this data breach is that most people have no idea that they are even customers of Equifax.

Equifax is a nationwide credit monitoring company. They develop credit scores for their customers based upon their financial history. This isn't a company you sign up for though to be a customer, they get their information through banks, credit card companies, retailers, and other financial businesses, often without you knowing. They then use this information to develop the credit score that you see online.

Equifax is doing their best to get ahead of this data breach but it seems to be fighting a losing battle. They are sending out letters to all of their customers that had their personal information compromised. They are also allowing customers to sign up for free credit file monitoring and identity theft protection for a year. They are actually offering this to all of their customers not just the ones that have been affected by the breach. No letter, or free credit monitoring will make up for the fallout of compromising millions of Americans personal information

How did this even happen? No one has taken responsibility for the hack yet, but Equifax says that the criminals “exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files.” Right now the New York Attorney General is investigating the breach. Along with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, The House of Financial Services Committee, and the House of Judiciary Committee.

What can we do now? CNN posted an article about 5 things you can do now to protect yourself. I have linked the article there but to summarize they talk about how you need to monitor your credit activity and put fraud alerts on your credit.

How can a type of breach like this be prevented? As I mentioned in my first blog Equifax could have hired HackerOne to help them prevent this type of breach. Your in house IT team can only find so many vulnerabilities and repair them. You are better off hiring a group of freelance hackers to look into your website and to see what they can find. When it comes to information as sensitive as this there is no price tag. Especially because I would imagine that Equifax will be paying a hefty fine for this breach, along with any potential lawsuits.

- Parker Fifield

HackerOne

When you hear the word “hacker” most people have a negative connotation attached to it. They believe that is someone that steals information or “hacks” into a company and steals their secrets. Then when I tell you that a company called HackerOne believes that they will reach $100 million in what they call “bounties paid out”  by 2020 from their business you probably think they are stealing and selling secrets. Not quite.

In today's world with all of information that is stored on the internet it has become extremely important to protect all of this information. This has created a new field of jobs for people that get referred to as hackers.They get paid to “hack” into people’s personal stuff, companies, or even government's databases and steal critical information then sell it to competitors that could be interested in this. Everyday there seems to be another breaking story that some big name companies security has been compromised by a foreign hacker. Or that our election may have been compromised by Russian hackers. Everyday it's something new, how does a company prevent their information prevent this?

This is where HackerOne takes a different spin with that name. HackerOne is a company that you hire to try to hack into your system. Why would you do this? Its simple, to find out where you're exposed.

How it works is that when you hire HackerOne, they start to invite their own freelance hackers. These hackers are trusted individuals that work independently and are incentivized by the company to find critical vulnerabilities. These hackers aren't here to steal the information they are here as security experts. These hackers use their own bugs or applications to try to get into the client's web site or database. After they have done so they deliver their own reports to the company and get paid their “bounty”. The bounty is their payment for finding out the weaknesses in the website.

HackerOne is used to supplement your in house security team. That in house security team can only find so much. Why not add an extra couple hundred eyes? There are going to be hackers poking through your site not matter what, why not have these hackers working for you so you can limit the exposure. This “hacker-powered security” has become so popular they currently have fixed over 52,000 bugs and $20.2 bounties have been paid out. They currently work with: General Motors, Starbucks,Uber, Spotify, and even the United States Department of Defense just to name a few.

Everyday there seems to be a new threat to our security, but it finally seems like there are effective ways to combat this new sensation of hackers. With HackerOne leading the way in Information Security.

- Parker Fifield