India’s medics on strike to protest rape and killing of doctor in Kolkata
Hospitals and clinics across India turned away patients except for emergency cases on Saturday as medical professionals started a 24-hour shutdown to protest the brutal rape and killing of a doctor in the eastern city of Kolkata.
More than one million doctors were expected to join the strike, paralyzing medical services across the world’s most populous nation. Hospitals said faculty staff from medical colleges had been pressed into service for emergency cases.
The government, in a statement issued on Saturday after a meeting with representatives of medical associations, urged doctors to return to duties in the public interest.
A 31-year old trainee doctor was raped and killed on Aug. 9 inside the medical college in Kolkata where she worked, triggering nationwide protests among doctors and drawing parallels to the notorious gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in New Delhi in 2012.
The strike cut off access to elective medical procedures and out-patient consultations, according to a statement by the Indian Medical Association (IMA).
Doctors across India are protesting by limiting non-emergency medical care to demand better protection for health-care workers after a female resident was raped and killed on the job.
“Junior doctors have all been on strike, so this would mean 90 per cent of doctors are on strike,” Sanjeev Singh Yadav, a representative of the IMA in the southern state of Telangana, told Reuters.
Outside the RG Kar Medical College, where the crime took place, a heavy police presence was seen on Saturday while the hospital premises were deserted, according to the ANI news agency.
Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, which includes Kolkata, has backed the protests across the state, demanding the investigation be fast-tracked and the guilty be punished in the strongest way possible.
A large number of private clinics and diagnostic centres remained closed in Kolkata on Saturday.
Dr. Sandip Saha, a private pediatrician in the city, told Reuters he would not attend to patients except in emergencies.
Hospitals and clinics in Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, Ahmedabad in Gujarat, Guwahati in Assam and Chennai in Tamil Nadu and other cities joined the strike, set to be one of the largest shutdown of hospital services in recent memory.
Patients lined up at hospitals, some unaware that the agitation would not allow them to get medical attention.
“I have spent 500 rupees ($8 Cdn) on travel to come here. I have paralysis and a burning sensation in my feet, head and other parts of my body,” an unidentified patient at SCB Medical College and Hospital in the city of Cuttack in Odisha state told local television.
“We were not aware of the strike. What can we do? We have to return home.”
Raghunath Sahu, 45, who had lined up at SCB Medical College and Hospital in Cuttack, told Reuters a daily quota set by the doctors to see patients had ended before noon.
“I have brought my ailing grandmother. They did not see her today. I will have to wait for another day and try again,” Sahu said while moving away from the line.
India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, the agency investigating the rape and killing, has summoned a number of medical students from RG Kar Medical College to ascertain the circumstances of the crime, according to a police source in Kolkata.
Investigators with the agency also questioned the principal of the hospital on Friday, the source said.
Suspect in custody
Questioning continued on Saturday, local television channels reported. One suspect is in the agency’s custody.
India’s government introduced sweeping changes to the criminal justice system, including tougher sentences, after the Delhi gang-rape, but campaigners say little has changed.
Anger at the failure of tougher laws to deter a rising tide of violence against women has fuelled protests by doctors and women’s groups.
“Women form the majority of our profession in this country. Time and again, we have asked for safety for them,” IMA president Dr. R.V. Asokan told Reuters on Friday.
Calls for harsh, quickly delivered punishment
The IMA has called for further legal measures to better protect health-care workers from violence and swift investigation of the “barbaric” crime in Kolkata.
“The punishment should be the harshest possible, should come faster, so within public memory,” said senior criminal lawyer Shobha Gupta, who represented a Muslim woman gang-raped during religious riots that swept the western state of Gujarat in 2002.
“When we are still angry about the crime, the result should come out. Punishment to play a role of deterrence, it should come faster.”
The government said in its statement a committee would be set up to suggest measures to further improve protection for health-care professionals.
Published at Sat, 17 Aug 2024 13:16:31 +0000
Florida company faces multiple lawsuits after massive data breach
A Florida-based company is facing multiple proposed class actions, after a massive data breach that one suit claims leaked nearly three billion files containing personal data on people in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., including names and home addresses.
One of the first suit to be reported on was a proposed class action filed Aug. 1 by California resident Christopher Hofmann in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. It alleges that a hacking group called USDoD posted a database on April 8 called “National Public Data” on a dark web forum claiming to have the personal data of 2.9 billion individuals, and attempted to sell it for $3.5 million US.
Tech site Bleeping Computer reported that a hacker then leaked a version of the stolen data for free on a hacking forum on Aug. 6.
At least six complaints have been filed against the company, National Public Data, this month.
Data came from company that does background checks
The data was allegedly stolen from Jerico Pictures Inc., which does business as National Public Data, a Florida-based company that does background checks.
Hofmann says in the suit the company obtained and stored his data without his consent. Because people don’t knowingly give their data to the company, it is hard for any individual to know whether they have been affected by the breach.
The suit claims the company “has still not provided any notice or warning” to Hofmann or other people affected by the breach.
“In fact, upon information and belief, the vast majority of class members were unaware that their sensitive [personal information] had been compromised, and that they were, and continue to be, at significant risk of identity theft and various other forms of personal, social, and financial harm,” it says.
Richard Rogerson, founder of cybersecurity firm Packetlabs, says the alleged magnitude of the breach is “quite scary” and will make it much easier for fraudsters to pull off scams using stolen identities.
“I’ve never seen a breach at this scale,” said Rogerson. “This is kind of uncharted territory.”
National Public Data confirmed the breach on Tuesday in a statement on its website, which on Friday appeared to be inaccessible.
The statement said the incident “is believed to have involved a third-party bad actor” that tried to hack into data in late December 2023, “with potential leaks of certain data” in April 2024 and summer 2024. The information the company suspects of being breached contains names, email addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers and mailing addresses.
National Public Data’s website says its services “are currently used by private investigators, consumer public record sites, human resources, staffing agencies and more.” The company did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s not clear exactly how the breach occurred
Some states require companies to report data breaches to their attorney general offices, but security company McAfee said it has not found any filings with state attorneys general.
The Florida Attorney General’s office has not been notified of the breach, it told CBC in an email.
The lawsuit states it is not clear exactly when or how the breach occurred.
“This data will continue to haunt us for a while, because a lot of this data is very static, and it’s not going to change over time,” Rogerson said.
“If you think about security controls like a fence, it lowers the fence from a 10-foot fence down to a two-foot fence. You can walk over that fence. It makes it a lot easier to pull off [fraud] attacks.”
Hofmann claims in the suit that his identity theft protection service alerted him in July that his personal information had been compromised as a direct result of the National Public Data breach and was found on the dark web.
Law firm Schubert Jonckheer & Kolbe, which said on Monday it is investigating the breach, wrote in a blog on its website that the data goes back at least three decades.
Cliff Steinhauer, director of information security and engagement at the National Cybersecurity Alliance, a non-profit that promotes online safety, says while this type of data has been leaked before, the difference is that now it’s all in one place.
“I think it may surprise many people that these companies exist and are allowed to collect and store that data — and even worse, they aren’t required to meet certain security criteria in order to do so,” he said.
Steinhauer says the nearly three billion files in the 277-gigabyte dump appear to include incomplete records, duplicates and records for people who are now dead, explaining how the number is significantly greater than the populations of Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. combined.
It is not yet known whether or to what degree the company may have been negligent in protecting its data, but Steinhauer questions why it was storing so much personal information for so long.
“I mean, do they really need to hold on to all this data about people who died this long ago?” he said.
Steinhauer says people can grow tired of reading about their data being breached and can feel helpless in situations like this, but it’s important to know there are things people can do to protect themselves.
He says everyone should assume their information has been compromised, and has several suggestions to protect your money and personal information.
- Keep your security software updated on your devices.
- Make your passwords complex, and at least 16 characters long.
- Use a password manager to save those passwords and generate new ones.
- Use a monitoring service that will alert you if your personal information has been found on the dark web.
- Enable multi-factor authentication to add a layer of protection against fraudsters.
- Use a service to set up monitoring for your credit reports, to “make sure that there aren’t any accounts on your credit report that you don’t recognize.”
- Be on alert for phishing and other scams, which tend to proliferate when news breaks about a large data breach.
Published at Fri, 16 Aug 2024 23:55:51 +0000
