Friday, November 17, 2017

O TARGET

Enrolment completed this week!

What a phenomenal achievement from everyone involved in TARGET.  Congratulations because in just 18 months 46 intensive care units in Australia and New Zealand enrolled 4,000 patients.

That's an average of 7.5 patients a day!  

The busiest day was the 4th of August when 25 patients were enrolled. Crazy!

And it wasn’t just enrolling patients and following up … there were so many bags of treatment to reconcile! … and so many large boxes to manage! 

 Congratulations to you all.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

We layered up our Firewall in the fight against cyber hacking

There has been a firewall protecting our clinical trial servers (and your data) ever since we put our first project in the cloud” in 2013. In the past 5 years we have had no incidents but in our striving for excellence we have gone one step further and added another layer of protection.  

In line with increasing threats and the availability of better protection, we have enhanced our firewall protection with additional layers for DDoS Mitigation, Virtual Patching, and prevention of Zero-Day Exploits. The additional firewall adds an extra level of armour to our servers (yes its a war out there!), will help protect your data and reduces the risk of downtime.  
 
How will the firewall do all that?
In a nutshell; all traffic for our #1 server is routed through this firewall where suspicious traffic is trashed before legitimate traffic is passed on to #1 server.  In more detail it will: 
  • Block hack attempts. The firewall filters traffic and blocks malicious traffic and attacks
  • Stop brute force attacks. Every application in the cloud gets hit with automated hacker tools known as brute force attacks. If login credentials, for your study, are guessed through one of these attacks hackers can gain access to the application. Our new firewall stops these attacks early.
  • Mitigate DDoS attacks. Distributed Denial of Service attacks can cause downtime for applications. These type of attacks, where multiple computers and multiple internet connections are used to flood the bandwidth on a server, are a nuisance because they prevent legitimate users logging in.
  • Prevent Zero Day Exploits. New vulnerabilities are being discovered by hackers every day. By partnering with firewall experts who have systems to intelligently stop suspicious behaviour we can stop these exploits even if there is no patch.
On with the battle to keep your data safe!