H1N1: Spain reports death from swine flu virus mutation

Spanish health ministry has reported that a Spanish patient, infected by a mutant strain of the swine flu A(H1N1) virus, has died.

"We have registered three cases of this mutation, including one which was fatal. We believe these are three isolated cases, and that there has been no transmission to any other person," a ministry spokesman reports.

It is the sixth officially reported fatal case of this mutation of the A(H1N1) virus in Europe, health minsters have acknowledged one in the Netherlands and two each in France and Norway.

Last month the WHO said that this mutation had been observed in Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, Ukraine, Italy and the United States as early as April 2009.

H1N1: Swine Flu virus mutation in Netherlands endangers patients

Dutch authorities said that a patient infected by a mutant strain of the swine flu virus had died, but added that primarily, the virus was not the cause of death, simply a contributing factor.

Tamiflu Resistant
Harald Wychgel, spokesman for the Dutch Institute for Health and the Environment, told AFP that there had been a "mutation or minor change in the virus to make it resistant to Tamiflu," used in the treatment for influenza. He neglected to say that this also makes it resistant to the current vaccine being provided to members of the Dutch and European public.

FUD
The use of Tamiflu as a 'treatment' is, in itself controversial and many consultants believe it has little real effect. The real benefit comes to the pharmaceutical companies that are distributing it widely using FUD selling techniques. (FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) It is helping them ride the storm of economic crisis also sweeping across Europe.

The male patient died on Sunday in the northern city of Groningen. The news of this was witheld until now. "He died not because the virus was resistant but because he was seriously ill and caught the Mexican (swine) flu," Wychgel said.

"We have carried out tests on the patient's associates to see if the mutation had spread but we found no such indications", he said.

Mutated virus spreading
The spread of Tamiflu resistant H1N1 (Influenza A) Swine Flu (Mexican flu) continues and reports said that two more patients in the Netherlands had shown resistance to Tamiflu and therefore the new vaccine.

The death in Groningen is the fifth fatal case of mutated A(H1N1) flu officially reported in Europe, after two in France and two in Norway but many more cases exist worldwide.

The World Health Organisation said last month that mutations had been observed in Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, where the swine flu pandemic began, Ukraine, and the United States, as early as April. Italy also reported a non-fatal case on Monday.

"The mutations appear to occur sporadically and spontaneously. To date, no links between the small number of patients infected with the mutated virus have been found and the mutation does not appear to spread," a WHO statement said on November 20.

The WHO also underlined that there was no evidence of more infections or more deaths as a result, while the mutated virus detected up to that point remained sensitive to antiviral drugs used to treat severe flu, oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza). Unfortunately this is not the case.

Scientists are less complacent and more knowledgable. They know and fear that mutations in flu viruses will continue because that is the nature of viruses, to change and survive. The appearance of a new and potentially virulent strain could cause a more deadly pandemic flu.

The virus scientists reiterated a call for close monitoring of all new variants of H1N1, no matter how 'safe' they appear to be at first. This is no time for rhetoric!

The WHO's role?
The WHO have been trying to downplay the existance of a vaccine resistant variant but has finally come out and admitted it. They also cannot deny that they have lost control of the situation, if they ever had it to begin with.

People are dying from a strain of influenza that they have no vaccine for. Their only role at present is to sit on their comfortable chairs enjoying their comfortable executive life, whilst keeping an accurate count of the mounting deaths, telling everyone that things are not that bad and waiting for the storm to pass.

The Money Trail
Meanwhile, the campaign to vaccinate the entire population of the world with a hastily prepared, poorly tested and potentially damaging vaccine, continues unabated.

After all, there is much at stake; stockpiles of vaccine to be paid for by public funds, process plants churning out millions of doses, sales targets to be met, expenses to be paid, celebratory lobbying events to be organised and incentives to be paid to co-operative government officials; all funded from the meagre profit margins of the pharmaceutical companies, allegedly.

Latest Virus Strategy Is to Write in Plain English

Hackers could evade most existing antivirus protection by hiding malicious code within ordinary text, according to security researchers.

One of the most common ways of hijacking other people's computers is to use "code-injection" attacks, in which malicious computer code is delivered to and then run on victims' machines. Current security measures work on the assumption that the code used has a different structure to plain text such as English prose.

Now a team of researchers has highlighted a potential future theatre in the virus-security arms race by working out how to hide malware within English-language sentences.

Josh Mason of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and his colleagues developed a way to search a large set of English text – mostly composed of more than 15,000 Wikipedia articles and roughly 27,000 books from the online library Project Gutenberg – for combinations of words that could be used in code.

Their program highlighted the text to be used in the instruction set in bold, while leaving the sections to be skipped in plain text, as in the following example: There is a major center of economic activity, such as Star Trek, including The Ed Sullivan Show. The former Soviet Union."

CODE STANDS OUT
It's not the first time the potential weakness has been recognised, but many computer security experts thought the rules of English word and sentence construction would make the task impossible.

In machine code – the raw code that microprocessor chips understand – combinations of characters not seen in plain text, such as strings of mostly capital letters, are required.

"There was not a lot to suggest it could be done because of the restricted instruction set [of machine code]," said Mason. "A lot of people didn't think it could be done."

John Walker, managing director of UK security consultancy Secure-Bastion, said the research highlighted a basic weakness in antivirus tactics, and that hackers would undoubtedly try to exploit it. "There is no doubt in my mind that antivirus software as we know it today has gone well past its sell-by date," he said.

Nicolas Courtois, a security and cryptology researcher at University College London, said malicious code in this form would be "very hard if not impossible to detect reliably".

Conficker Worm - Still Ice Cold at DefCon Conference

All talk of the Conficker Worm was sanitised at the Black Hat conference to protect the current investigation.

The criminal ring is very savvy and might have infiltrated the group hunting it down, one investigator says.

The international security team tracking down Conficker thought that the masterminds behind it would have been apprehended by now, according to one of the leaders of the effort to stamp out the resilient worm but that’s not the way it has worked out.

Investigators cautious
A meeting and presentation talk at Black Hat yesterday had to be scaled back because it contained information about Conficker that might tip the investigators’ hand and send the perpetrators further underground, says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure and a member of the Conficker Working Group.

A Forensic Look
When Hypponen submitted the abstract for his Black Hat briefing more than six months ago, he thought he’d be presenting a forensic look at a dead worm and that the team who had written and managed it would be out of action. “I had hoped that by the end of July we would be in a totally different situation, the case would be closed and the group would be in jail,” Hypponen said in an interview after his talk.

Critical Information
His official line was that he was asked last week not to reveal critical information that might help prolong Conficker’s reign over millions of computers and inhibit the ongoing criminal investigation. “So I will end my presentation here,” Hypponen said at the conclusion of his Black Hat session. “Thank you very much. I will not be taking any questions.”

Holding Back
Hypponen said afterwards that he wasn’t forced to curtail his remarks (Black Hat has been the site of numerous speech-blockings and speech-blocking attempts, including that of a researcher Cisco sued because he was to reveal a flaw in the company's IOS code). Rather, Hypponen had already realised that it made sense to hold back some of what the working group has found out. “It’s better to keep them in the dark about what is known,” he says.

Agility and Precision
Given the agility and precision with which Conficker alters its tactics, Hypponen doesn’t rule out that the Conficker Working Group itself might have been infiltrated by Conficker operatives.
He wouldn’t say how close he thinks authorities are to bringing down the group, but did say there is an indication that it is based in the Ukraine. Some techniques used in Conficker match those used in an earlier worm, which might mean the same people were behind both.

Ukrainian Police
That earlier worm avoided propagating to machines in the Ukraine, which might mean that the group is based there and was trying to avoid committing a local crime to keep Ukrainian police off their backs, Hypponen says.

Technical Sophistication
During his talk Hypponen outlined some of Confickter’s technical sophistication. In one version change – the worm has gone through five major revisions – the worm adopted the MD-6 cryptographic hash algorithm. Investigators estimate that MD-6 was only a month or so old when it was incorporated in Conficker, making the worm one of the earliest implementations of MD-6, he says.

Buffer Overflow
The next major revision of Conficker patched an MD-6 buffer-overflow vulnerability that was publicly announced about six weeks earlier, which means the criminals keep themselves in the loop with the latest advances, he says. (The patch they used was identical to the one issued by MD-6 creators.)

Disables Infected Machines
The worm avoids sending itself to domains owned by members of the Conficker Working Group, and it disables infected machines so they can’t reach sites where they might seek help.

F-Secure Help Site
Hypponen’s company set up a help site with a different domain name from its regular business site that included the term F-secure, and the next version of Conficker blocked it. The company changed the term to Fsecure with no hyphen, and the next revision blocked that, too, he says.

The worm had been propagating to eight top level Internet domains and the working group mustered enough cooperation to shut it down in all those domains, Hypponen says. The next version propagated to 116 domains, he says.

Strategy Weak
“These guys are very good in cryptography and code development,” he says, but maybe not so good about strategy, given the attention they drew to themselves. “They didn’t know better than to infect 10 million computers in a couple of days.” The goal of any botnet ought to be to remain hidden, not draw attention to itself, he says.

“They might have experience in another crime business but hadn’t run a botnet before. If they were more experienced, they’d know better.”

The Malady Lingers on
It would make sense, Hypponen says, for the Conficker gang to abandon its current botnet and build a new one that doesn’t get too big too fast and doesn’t draw a team of experts to fight it. “Maybe they already have,” he says.

No Swine Flu Vaccine for the Elderly

What has happened to the normal adage of Woman and Children first?

Elderly swine flu victims should be sacrificed and sent to the back of the queue for anti-viral treatment, when supplies of the drugs are limited, according to new research in Italy.

Scientists found there were circumstances in which anti-virals such as the relatively ineffective Tamiflu, should be rationed in favour of younger adults.

The controversial strategy could be the most effective way to save lives and prevent illness, it was claimed.

Priorities
It is very interesting because it is not only indicative as to how these organisations think now but it is also how they will respond in the face of a fully blown Pandemic, when lives will be sacrificed and priorities will be established.

Italian Research
The research focused on Italy, which was said to have only enough anti-virals to treat seven million people, or 12% of the population.

Mathematical modeling showed that governments should stockpile enough drugs to treat at least a quarter of their populations, assuming moderate levels of infection. This in itself may lead to strategic prioritisation against the poor and elderly.

If supplies were lower than this, it made sense to ration the anti-virals according to age-specific fatality rates.

Historical Influence
When swine flu followed the pattern of the great 1918 pandemic and was most lethal to younger adults, treatment should not be targeted at the elderly, said the researchers. Instead, it should be reserved for the young.

This is the reverse of the policy adopted during outbreaks of normal seasonal flu, when priority is given to the over-65s. It is also academic because a new and effective ant-viral vaccine has yet to be developed and tested safely, prior to its distribution.

New Vaccine Risks
On release of the new vaccine, the risks are clear; the priority will be given to those deemed to be the youngest and most important; economically and politically powerful and influencial.

Unfortunately, if the vaccine is flawed, this will damage these very same people and cause a shift in the balance of power across the globe, affecting a tidal change in a large number of countries, organisations and populations.

Weathering the Storm
The first ones into the lifeboats to save their sinful souls, may find themselves in further peril at sea. Like rats jumping off the Titanic onto the iceberg for safety. Their fate remains unchanged, just the method is different.

We are all victims in a Pandemic but the great benefit of being economically and politically powerful and influencial is that you can make choices, whereas others can only wait, endure and accept, with stoicism and dignity.

H1N1 Pandemic in UK: Sudden Increase in Cases

pa.press.net

GPs have seen a leap of almost 50% in the numbers of people contacting them with fears they have swine flu in the last week, new figures reveal.

Around 40,000 people a week in England and Wales are now complaining to their doctor of "flu-like illness", with a dramatic rise in the number of young children being affected.

The Royal College

The figures, from the Royal College of GPs' monitoring system, showed 50.3 people per 100,000 were reporting flu-like illness between June 29 and July 5, but this leapt by 46% to 73.4 people per 100,000 between July 6 and 12.

Financial Times

Almost one in eight workers are likely to be kept at home with the virus in the next few weeks, according to Government figures. This could leave many businesses struggling to run as normal, the Financial Times reported.

Sir Liam Donaldson is expected to announce that 30% of the population is likely to be infected during this first wave of the pandemic, the FT newspaper said.

Young at most Risk
Wednesday's weekly report from the Royal College of GPs said: "National incidence of influenza-like illness increased for all regions and is now evident in all age groups but remains highest in five to 14 age groups."

Central England Hotspot
The study said the highest number of cases was being seen in central England but the North had seen "a marked increase compared to previous weeks".

There has been a small decrease in the number of cases being seen in London although the capital remains a major hot spot for the virus.

Statistics
The rate of influenza-like illness is highest among those aged five to 14, at 159.57 per 100,000 population. The next most affected group is youngsters and babies aged up to four, at 114.12 per 100,00 population. This is followed by people aged 15 to 44, those aged 45 to 64 and then people aged 65 and over.

Ant-viral Vaccine
The Government has insisted that the swine flu vaccine should begin arriving at the end of August, amid genuine fears of a delay in this delivery date, and further delay before people receive jabs.

The UK claims, it is in line to get around 60 million doses of the vaccine - enough to cover half the population - by the end of December, with the rest of the doses following next year.

Vaccine Production Delayed
This is a substantial turn around in their earlier claims and the first phase of the virus should have run its course by then. The mutated second phase will take over and the vaccine will be ineffective against it.

Virus Dictates Timeline
It is impossible to determine how the H1N1 virus will mutate, so scientists are unable to prepare in advance for this strain. Only when the new strain is identified will they be able to start on development of a new anti-viral vaccine.

So, the development, testing and distribution of a second antiviral vaccine will need to start after January 2010 and is therefore unlikely to be in production before the Spring 2010.

H1N1: How Swine Flu kills

As the H1N1 swine flu pandemic continues to spread around the world, most cases are still mild but reports are starting to emerge of people who sicken and die very quickly of what appears to be viral pneumonia. Now two independent groups of scientists have now found out why and it's all down to where the virus binds within the body.

H1N1 swine flu comes from pigs, so it binds well to cell-surface molecules in the respiratory tracts of other mammals, including humans but there are slight differences in the way different flu proteins bind to these receptors.

Two separate teams – one led by Ron Fouchier at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the other by Terrence Tumpey at the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia – both report that the pandemic virus binds deeper than ordinary flu in the respiratory tract of ferrets, the animal most like humans when it comes to flu.

A virus of the same H1N1 family as the pandemic flu has been circulating as ordinary seasonal flu since 1977. Both groups found that the seasonal virus binds almost exclusively to cells in the ferrets' noses. But, the pandemic H1N1 binds deeper, in the lung's trachea, bronchi and bronchioles. The pandemic virus also replicated more, and caused more damage, though none of the ferrets were severely ill.

'New' H1N1 Brazilian flu strain! Don't panic - false alarm

Take a jumpy media, throw in a statement hastily translated from Portuguese, and what have you got? A "new" and potentially deadly strain of H1N1 influenza in Brazil, according to a rash of news stories that appeared earlier today.

"It was not yet known whether the new strain was more aggressive than the current A(H1N1) virus which has been declared pandemic by the World Health Organization," reported Agence France Presse, setting the mood for a new round of pandemic panic.

But this "new" strain is nothing of the sort. In fact, the sequence of its gene for the haemagglutinin surface protein, deposited in the GenBank database, is the same as isolates from several other countries.

"There is nothing new and surprising about it. It is identical to the others," said Richard Webby of St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

The scare seems to be based on a misunderstanding of a "technical note" posted on the website of the Adolfo Lutz Institute in Saõ Paulo. It states that researchers led by Terezinha Maria de Paiva sequenced the haemagglutinin and matrix protein genes from a virus isolated from a 26-year-old man who was hospitalized in Brazil in April after a trip to Mexico, finding subtle differences for the haemagglutinin gene from a single reference strain of H1N1 isolated in California.

The note doesn't mention that the sequence is the same as other isolates found elsewhere. Even so, subtle changes from a single reference strain are nothing to get terribly excited about, given the normal rates of mutation in influenza viruses. "It's what you'd expect for influenza," says Adolfo García-Sastre of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

H1N1: Egypt pig slaughter prompts religious discourse

Egyptian police have clashed with pig farmers after announcing a cull to allegedly combat swine flu. Egypt has ordered the slaughter of 300,000 to 400,000 pigs as a so called, "precaution" against the effect of H1N1 virus, a move the United Nations said was "a real mistake"

These drastic and extreme measures have been taken by the north African country, although it has yet to report any H1N1 cases. This over-reaction could be due to the fact that Egypt was hit hard by bird flu in 2005/6 or there could be different, more fundamental reasons.

In Cairo, police fired tear gas at farmers and protesters who pelted them with rocks and bottles over fears they had come to seize their pigs. At least ten people were injured in the clashes in Manshiet Nasr, a shantytown on the outskirts of the capital city. Residents burned tyres and rubbish in the street to keep police at bay. Three officers were also injured in clashes with pig farmers in other areas of the capital.

The sad truth is that the H1N1 virus is being spread by people, not pigs. Destroying innocent and valuable livestock and the devastating effect this will have on the owners and their families, is beyond measure. In this poverty stricken area, these people are fighting for their lives.

Some political commentators say that culling swine, which are mainly raised by the Christian minority and viewed as unclean by Muslims, could have different and more sinister undertones, rather than simply being an extremely puzzling and foolish measure to quell rising public panic.

If this is the case, then a more severe backlash will develop over the coming days and weeks. Loosely targeted at the pigs, their owners and their livelihood, it may well plunge Egypt into increased levels of civil disobedience, fueled by bigotry, extremism and political unrest.

Tamiflu & Relenza Resistance is a certainty rather than a risk

Two anti-flu drugs are commonly stockpiled for use in a flu pandemic: oseltamivir, which is sold as Tamiflu, and zanamivir, which is sold as Relenza. Both work by inhibiting an enzyme called neuraminidase (the 'N' in H1N1). The virus needs this enzyme to break down normal cell walls and to replicate using a mutated version of the victims own RNA.

The 2 drugs act on different parts of the enzyme and resistance to one drug does not confer resistance to the other. The Mexican H1N1 strain is currently classed as being 'sensitive' to both drugs. This is not a 'cure' it is simply a 'treatment' and no one knows how long this 'sensitivity' will last.

The Wu team conducted their study after noticing that despite concerns about resistance, many countries stockpile just one drug, usually oseltamivir. There are some exceptions, however, including Australia and the UK, which stockpile both drugs.

Viruses are notorious for their ability to develop resistance to drugs. Last year, an H1N1 flu strain that caused some seasonal flu rapidly developed resistance to oseltamivir. By December, "close to 100 per cent of H1N1 in Australia and the US, and many other parts of the world, were resistant to Tamiflu", says Raina MacIntyre, an infectious disease expert at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

H1N1 Swine Flu: very weak viral strain

First genetic analysis of how well this virus transmits from person to person concludes that it spreads barely well enough to keep itself going.

The analysis also suggests the virus may have started circulating as long ago as January. But because there have been so few cases to analyse, the calculation is uncertain. It could have started more recently, or as far back as September.

Nicholas Grassly of Imperial College London and Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh, UK, have analysed the rate of spread. Their analysis is based on the small mutations that have accumulated in almost two dozen genetic sequences produced so far, from viruses collected from patients in Mexico and the US.

Freely available

In contrast to H5N1 bird flu, all the genetic sequences of this H1N1 are being posted on bulletin boards like GISAID, where scientists can access them and compare preliminary analyses.

The GISAID system was set up in 2006 by scientists who protested that H5N1 sequences were not being made freely available.

"The limited sampling so far gives rise to considerable uncertainty in the estimate," cautions Rambaut. But if the rate at which genes mutate is about the same for this virus as for other H1N1 viruses, the number of mutations that have accumulated so far suggests it has been circulating since January – or even September 2008.

Weak virus

If the new virus spreads from one infected person to the next at about the same speed as ordinary flu, that gives an idea of how many cases there may have been in that time. A mathematical model permits the calculation of an important variable called R₀ – the number of additional people infected, on average, by each case. If R₀ is less than one, an infection dies out.

Grassly also cautions that the estimate is very preliminary. But with the data available now, he gets an R₀ of 1.16 – enough for the virus to keep going, but only just.

This could be good news. In epidemiological theory, at least, the lower the R₀, the easier it may be to snuff the virus out by further hindering its spread.

But it may be too early for celebrations. The 1918 flu pandemic, caused by another H1N1 virus, started with a mild, early wave in spring and early summer. The flu lab at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US estimates that the R₀ of the 1918 virus in spring was only 1.45. That shot up, they estimate, to 3.75 when the virus began its lethal second wave the following autumn.

Much may now depend on how quickly the new H1N1 virus from swine adapts to people.

Swine Flu H1N1 Level 4: Can business survive this after severe lay-offs

The business world is growing increasingly concerned about a quickly developing H1N1 swine flu outbreak, with cases now appearing all over the world, and hundreds more in Mexico.

This should ring loud alarm bells for IT managers and spur them on to take a close look at the dusty old influenza pandemic plans, developed several years ago in response to a potential bird flu pandemic.

The additional problem that IT managers are facing today, is that following the recent consolidations, layoffs and restructurings, they will have less staff and reduced capability to deal with events. They will also have disjointed and inadequate response plans to correct because the old ones were drafted in more favourable times. People who once took a pivotal role as part of a critical team, may now be on garden-leave, collecting unemployment money or re-assigned to another location or position.

Clearly, it is very important that managers pay close attention to what's going on; the H1N1 pandemic situation is a dynamic event and is still emerging. It has been developing quickly over a short period of time. This is something that needs to be monitored and taken very seriously.

Now, the World Health Organization has raised its threat level to Level 4 in its six-level scale because the swine flu currently has "a sustained limited human-to-human transmission."

While the business world figures out just what this means, the Contingency managers are already pushing and recommending that the business seriously reviews and updates their call lists and decision-making chains. It is essential that they close any gaps and weaknesses in plans caused by recent organisational restructuring and downsizing, in particular.

If an organisation has not developed a specific pandemic plan, then they should do so quickly. Develop one by concentrating on one key factor; making a continuity plan that is business focused and that considers a "significant absence" of employees. Give serious thought about how your business could support its clients and sustain services by the use of tele-working methods and virtual environments, from your employees homes.

The standard model used in pandemic planning is to consider what would happen to a business if 40% of the workforce was absent, for an extended period of time. In this case it would be pertinent to consider a range of options, taking into consideration absentee levels of between 25 and 40%.

The WHO is in the midst of its initial investigations of the illness, and they currently believe that it may not be anywhere near the threat envisaged, specifically if the bird flu became a human influenza pandemic.

Gartner Inc.'s response in 2006 was to suggest stringent measures to IT departments, such as storing 42 gallons of water per data centre worker, enough for a six-week quarantine. Even at the time this was felt to be excessive.

Asked if Gartner was offering any advice in response to the Mexican outbreak, analyst Ken McGee, the author of that Gartner report, said today that it will go into "full-force advisory mode" not when the virus jumps from birds or swine to people, but when it jumps from people to people. So, that will be quite soon then. Worryingly, it does show a slight lack of foresight and planning on Gartner's side, as well as a reactive rather than proactive response.

If nothing else, the Mexican situation will acts as a wake-up call for businesses and clients that need to develop meaningful infectious virus disease-related influenza plans. If you consider this as a meaningful step for you, then the next sensible thing to do would be to have your plans checked and reviewed by a risk and contingency expert. These simple measures are by far preferably to having a 'live' and potentially destructive test being inflicted upon your business by the virus itself, in whatever form it takes. Your choice or no choice.

H1N1: The story behind the pandemic

The H1N1 influenza viruses consisting of a mixture of human, swine and bird strains (H5N1) are not new, they have been found before throughout history of mankind. However, there is a sense in which this virus could be regarded as partly man-made.

Flu viruses contain 8 strands of RNA, which code for 10 proteins. If two flu viruses infect a cell at the same time, new viruses budding from that cell can contain a mixture of RNA strands from the two original viruses, this is a phenomenon called re-assortment. This Recombination, "cutting and pasting", can also produce some evolutionary mixing within RNA strands.

Vaccines such as Tamiflu (Oseltamivir) and Relenza (Zanamivir), are not totally effective against viral strains

It is unusual to be infected by two flu viruses at the same time, and even rarer for one of those viruses to come from another species altogether, but it does happen, especially in pigs, which are susceptible to both human and bird flu viruses. Repeated re-assortments can produce mixtures like that found in the swine flu virus now spreading worldwide.

Again it is not a new phenomenon. There was re-assortment between bird and human flu viruses in pigs in Italy during the 1980s and in the 1990s, a H1N2 swine flu circulating in pigs in the UK was found to be a mixture of swine, human and bird flu strains resulting from multiple re-assortments.

December 2008, the Austrian branch of US vaccine company Baxter sent a batch of ordinary human H3N2 flu, altered so it couldn't replicate, to Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, also in Austria. In February, a lab in the Czech Republic working for Avir alerted Baxter that, unexpectedly, ferrets inoculated with the sample had died. It turned out the sample contained live H5N1, which Baxter uses to make vaccine. The two batches seem to have been mixed in error.

It is not yet clear exactly when and how Mexican swine flu strain evolved, but it could certainly have happened without the help of genetic engineers. Despite this, the swine flu could still be regarded as man-made.

Mounted Policeman in Mexico City sports a facemask

There are now over 6 billion people on the planet, and each year we raise more than a billion pigs and perhaps as many as 70 billion chickens. The result is a paradise for influenza viruses, which can lie dormant for long periods.

The problem is not just the sheer number of potential hosts. The conditions in which animals are kept can favour the evolution of new and deadlier strains.

Par example, in the wild, flu viruses can be self-limiting. The nasty flu strains that make animals too ill to walk or fly are unlikely to spread far. In crowded factory farms, they can spread like wildfire, helped by the global trade in animals and the distribution and transportation of animal products.

Vaccines such as Tamiflu (Oseltamivir) and Relenza (Zanamivir), are not totally effective against viral strains

The intimate interaction of farm workers with animals, especially on small-holdings where pigs, ducks, chickens and children all happily intermingle, also provides plenty of opportunities for viruses to jump species.

Animal vaccines might seem like the answer, but vaccines e.g Tamiflu (Oseltamivir) and Relenza (Zanamivir) that do not provide 100% protection can actually make things worse. Vaccines are not totally effective against viral strains. When there is widespread vaccination, viruses can mutate and spread without any visible disease. Viruses are smart. Ineffective vaccines also create strong selective pressure driving the evolution of new strains that can dodge the immune attack provoked by the vaccine.

Already, attention is turning to the big pig farms in Mexico, and the role they may have played in creating this new strain of swine flu but all intensive pig farming is a 'risk' and 'at risk'.

The undeniable and scary fact is, that we still know so little about flu and what makes it capable of spreading from human to human. This means that analysing and reverse engineering a virus of this kind and developing an anti-virus, would be a huge challenge.

Virulent strain of Influenza virus is released accidentally

Yes, it's possible that this virus was created by a mistake at a research laboratory or a vaccine factory and it is more possible that a virulent strain has been accidentally released into the wild, as has happened many times before and the most plausible explanation is, that this monster is the long-predicted product of our farming system.

H5N1 (Bird Flu) virus - Risky move

IT'S emerged that virulent H5N1 bird flu was sent out by accident from an Austrian lab last year and given to ferrets in the Czech Republic before anyone realised. As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1 got mixed with a human strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could unleash a pandemic.

Last December, the Austrian branch of US vaccine company Baxter sent a batch of ordinary human H3N2 flu, altered so it couldn't replicate, to Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, also in Austria. In February, a lab in the Czech Republic working for Avir alerted Baxter that, unexpectedly, ferrets inoculated with the sample had died. It turned out the sample contained live H5N1, which Baxter uses to make vaccine. The two batches seem to have been mixed in error.

Markus Reinhard of Baxter says no one was infected because the H3N2 was handled at a high level of containment. But Ab Osterhaus of Erasmus University in the Netherlands says: "We need to go to great lengths to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen."

Lock-up your dockers

A laptop is stolen every 53 seconds, and 97 percent are never recovered!

Worse, one out of every 10 laptops will be stolen within the first 12 months of purchase!

Will you be next?

All of your family photos, tax return files, bank statements, etc. at risk. Not to mention all those usernames and passwords that you auto-saved somewhere. You say something must be done.

If you manage a business or work in a corporate environment, the cost will be even steeper than just replacing hardware: think of the public relations nightmare from the theft and legal requirement to alert employees and clients about the information breach.

According to some expert sources, the cost to a company can total €197 per missing record when factoring in the loss of customers, legal fees and the PR crisis management quelling efforts.

Clearly, a few thousand records can quickly add up.

“The loss of a laptop computer may well be quite expensive if it contains unencrypted confidential data,” according to the 2008 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey. In 2008, 42 percent of all corporate security incidents were because of a stolen laptop, second only to viruses and insider abuse.

H5N1 Pandemic Flu - breakthrough research

From my previous article on the H5N1 Pandemic flu virus, you will know that the flu virus constantly alters its surface proteins and constantly mutates into variant forms. This means that we can be infected many times over a lifetime and a flu vaccine made last year has but a short period of effectiveness.

Now studies show that this behaviour is just a decoy to guard the virus's more vulnerable parts; a fact that might enable us to make drugs, or a vaccine, that will work on all kinds of flu, year after year.

Flu's main surface protein, haemagglutinin, looks like a lollipop. Our immune systems mostly produce antibodies to its rounded head, and it is this part that changes every year, making immunity short-lived. But in a large library of human antibodies, Wayne Marasco at Harvard University and colleagues found very few that bind its "stalk", which barely changes at all, either through time or between different flu viruses.

To see if this might provide a way to attack the virus, they produced large amounts of the antibodies that home in on the stalk and found that they cured and protected mice from two kinds of H5N1 bird flu, as well as many other flu families including H1N1 pandemic and ordinary flu. The researchers now want to develop the antibodies as a flu drug, possibly to stockpile for pandemics.

The team also plans to test the stalk antibody as a vaccine, so that people produce more of these antibodies themselves. They suspect haemagglutinin's big head is a decoy aimed to attract the immune system's attention and to stop us making many antibodies to the stalk – a delicate bit of molecular machinery that not be so easy to change to evade our immune attacks. In tests on mice, they found that the flu viruses did not evolve to escape the treatment.

Another benefit is that such antibodies stay effective for more than three weeks when injected into people, and in a pandemic could keep people alive long enough to produce their own antibodies to the virus.

Dirty Laundry - leaking Security

Oh what a tangled web....
Your security providers cannot, and will not, tell you the whole truth about their security business because security is a state of mind. An illusion based on perception and relativity.

We accept the need for security service providers to specialise in the protection of our functioning environments and see their task as preventing or reducing unacceptable risk. You would be very naive to think they do this for altruistic reasons. The goal of the security market is to make money and they are doing very well, thank you.

As with all profit focused companies; 1) Security companies specialise in niche markets and have varying degrees of success in these markets 2) There are universal weaknesses in the structure that are not being addressed because;

• the technology or algorithms are not sophisticated enough, yet
  
• the market won't pay the price in restricted access, additional filters /controls that slow throughput and diminish transfer speeds
  
• they are chasing a shape-changing, highly motivated and relentless attacker, some of which are government sponsored
• Others
  

Here are some secrets of the security industry and practical ways to command honesty from your trusted security providers.

• Antivirus certification omissions - One of the biggest secrets in the industry is that, while antivirus tools detect replicating malicious code like worms, they do not identify malcode e.g. nonreplicating Trojans. Although Trojans have been around since the beginning of malicious code, there is no accountability in antivirus certification tests. Today Trojans and other forms on nonreplicating malcode constitute 80% or more of the threats businesses are likely to face. Antivirus accountability metrics are simply no longer reflective of the true state of threat.
• There is no perimeter - If you want to fight on the perimeter then you need to define where and what the perimeter is. Is the endpoint the perimeter i.e. is the user the perimeter? Is it not more likely that the business process is the perimeter, and the information itself forms part of the perimeter too. It is unlikely that you design your security controls with no base assumption on establishing a perimeter. The mistaken assumption we tend to make is that we have established controls at the perimeter and are therefore secure. Unfortunately for many types of threats, we could be very wrong.
• Risk management applies - Risk management threatens vendors. Risk management really helps an organization understand its business and its highest level of risk. However, your priorities don't always map to what the vendors are selling. Vendors focus on niche markets and individual issues so you will continue to buy their individual niche products. If you don't have a clear picture of your risk profile and priorities, vendors are obliged to set them for you. Trusted security partners will provide options for assessing your risk posture and help you develop plans to make the most security impact for the least cost and complexity. Security needs to conform to and support your business priorities. Too often, vendors want your business to conform to their product portfolio.
• Vulnerable People are more of a risk than weak software. - There are 3 areas to be considered where security is vulnerable; 1) software 2) weak configuration and 3) people. The lion's share of the security market is focused on the so-called software vulnerabilities but not so much on the other 2 areas. The people factor is the largest uncovered area of risk. This is malicious code that doesn't leverage a vulnerability but rather leverages the vulnerable person. e.g. downloading a dancing skeleton for 'a spooky good time' (this was a trick employed by Storm), social engineering, spear phishing, etc. While we still need to find software vulnerabilities and patch them, we must understand that an organization is only as strong as its weakest link (the user). And more attention needs to be paid in mitigating the other two ways beyond software.
• Can Compliance threaten security - Compliance in and of itself is a good thing but it does not equal security. At the very least it's a resource and budget conflict and it can split our focus. Compliance is there to raise and maintain the minimum standard of security, but in its weakest form, it only maintains the minimum requirements.
• What is easy to measure is not always the most valuable - If you have 15 software vulnerabilities last month and record that 12 of them have been patched, is this a true reflection of your effectiveness. It is much harder to measure how effective end user training was to make administrators immune to social engineering attacks. You need to be compliant, but don't allow your entire risk strategy to sit back and relax, based on it.
• Vendor blind spots allowed for Storm - Storm is being copied and improved. The Storm era of botnets is alive and well, nearly two years from when it first appeared. How is this possible? 1. Botnets thrive in the consumer world where there is little money for innovation. Storm and its controllers know and survive on this. They are making money out of everything from spam to pump-and-dump stock scams. 2. They seem to be able to eat antivirus techniques for breakfast. A lot of the techniques and innovations used by Storm are not new; they are just being leveraged artfully against the blind spots of antivirus certifications and antivirus vendors. 3. Malcode does not need vulnerabilities. Most of the Storm recruitment drives have leveraged social engineering and play off of a holiday or sporting event. Go team!
  
• Product v Process - Security protection has established itself as a huge professional business. "Technology without strategy is chaos". The security market is too focused on the latest red hot top box or super scorching technology. The shear volume of security products and the rate of change has super-saturated most organisations and exceeded their ability to keep up. Organizations realize only a fraction of the capabilities of their existing investments. Furthermore, the cost of the product is often a fraction of the cost of ownership. There was a time when you could "do it yourself." But the simple days of Virus meets Antivirus are long gone. Highly effective organisations are embracing professional and managed security services to extend and augment their in-house expertise. By focusing your in-house expertise on what you know best i.e. your business, the scale comes from teaming with third-party expertise. This will be increasingly necessary in these tough economic times.

The primary goals for executives is to squeeze cost, whilst maximising profit and reducing complexity. Today we are seeing a massive convergence in the security market. In a guard-dog eats guard-dog world there are soon only going to be a few big dogs left and a bunch of smaller mutts. Will the consolidation dogfight lead to better efficiency or will it lead to a vendor lock-in?

As company leaders and executives continue to squeeze and simplify, they will face many choices. Simply following the reduction of vendors by consolidation, may fail to meet their needs and balance their fragile cargo; cost, complexity and risk. Do vendors have a responsibility in this equation? Will they rise to the challenge? True risk management can show how and where you can adjust and prune appropriate solutions,

The key is using risk management methodology to drive responsible simplification of business processes and to take control of the future.