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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: 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.
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  • (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.