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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the windows-tco dept.

Brian Krebs summarizes a report about increased deaths due to Microsoft products, which have been implicated in several service outages at various hospitals. These outages have resulted in a measurable increase in fatality.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management took the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) list of healthcare data breaches and used it to drill down on data about patient mortality rates at more than 3,000 Medicare-certified hospitals, about 10 percent of which had experienced a data breach.

As PBS noted in its coverage of the Vanderbilt study, after data breaches as many as 36 additional deaths per 10,000 heart attacks occurred annually at the hundreds of hospitals examined.

The researchers found that for care centers that experienced a breach, it took an additional 2.7 minutes for suspected heart attack patients to receive an electrocardiogram.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:42PM (7 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:42PM (#918599) Journal

    Let's pretend that Microsoft products play no role in this problem. Let's concentrate on one question: WTF are critical systems exposed to the internet? Hospitals should have two entirely different networks if they require internet connectivity. One for the internet, public relations, patient convenience, and whatever. The critical stuff cannot, and will not connect to the internet.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:55PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:55PM (#918616) Journal

    Modded you insightful, but I'm GLAD to see a calling out OF Microsoft shit, that it IS Microsoft products doing the bad.

    Usually, the articles are full of software badness and the meanness of 'hackers', but the names Microsoft or Windows are conveniently left out.

    We need to see this more often: maybe people 'in charge' will finally decide to stop using MS products; will finally start pressuring software makers to port their products to safer software/OS's.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by BK on Sunday November 10 2019, @05:02PM (1 child)

    by BK (4868) on Sunday November 10 2019, @05:02PM (#918638)

    Right or wrong, I think you may have missed the point of TFA.

    Regardless of why it happens in the first place, hospitals that suffer data breaches, ransomware attacks, etc. respond as expected — the implement best practices and get their IT house more-or-less in order. They close the proverbial barn door after the horse is out. In their defense, they have more than one horse.

    BUT

    Upon doing this, their actual response to actual medical emergencies suffers. The article doesn’t tell us if its because the doctor is being prompted to reset their password and requires 87 characters including an uppercase, lowercase, number, symbol, subscript, superscript, and an emoji. Or if the nurse has to read And type a 6 digit changing number into the defibrillator each time it is charged. Or if a PA would like to access reference material but the only computer that has access to a network of information regarding health and various other domains of human knowledge is in the secure room in the basement that can only be accessed with your retinal scan and even THEN requires a special one-time password that can only be obtained from the CIO... who is on vacation this week. But SOMETHING is delaying treatment.

    Improved security apparently costs lives. Linux kills grandma. Or, that’s what the data shows. Or so TFA alleges.

    --
    ...but you HAVE heard of me.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @12:38AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @12:38AM (#918760)

      It's not likely that password obnoxiousness is the cause of the problem.

      It's more likely that the problem is caused by new systems replacing old ones, which cause the staff to be unfamiliar with them and thus less effective. Or possibly some systems that are deemed "insecure" stop existing at all, and staff has to do things manually/on paper/whatever.

      But you're right that it would be nice to find out exactly what is causing the problem, instead of having to guess.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Sunday November 10 2019, @05:52PM (1 child)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Sunday November 10 2019, @05:52PM (#918650) Journal

    WTF are critical systems exposed to the internet?

    Really, an electrocardiogram requires internet access now? I guess they gotta make sure the license is valid and the user isn't a "terrorist", or at least to check if his parking tickets are paid.

    Very unfortunate that we allow this

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @06:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @06:59PM (#918669)

      Not sure about EKG interpretation specifically, but remote radiology for example requires internet access.

      Now, we might wonder why we need radiologists (or cardiologists) in remote locations.

      The answer is ever the same: profits of the hospital administrators.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @07:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @07:18PM (#918673)

    The issue is all products are expsode to internet by default.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Sunday November 10 2019, @08:10PM

    by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Sunday November 10 2019, @08:10PM (#918682) Journal

    Having worked on a critical infrastructure system in the past, I would say that you'd be surprised what we have connected to the internet.

    Except I know you too well by what you write here, and I know you won't be surprised. It truly is insane what we have hooked up directly to the Internet. The internet of things is just the beginning of proof of that.