It’s Way Too Easy to Hack the Hospital

If you recall this post from 2011, you knew this day was coming.

The culture of “Patch & Pray” will be the downfall so long as America chooses to be reactive over proactive.

 

Firewalls and medical devices are extremely vulnerable, and everyone’s pointing fingers

In the fall of 2013, Billy Rios flew from his home in California to Rochester, Minn., for an assignment at the Mayo Clinic, the largest integrated nonprofit medical group practice in the world. Rios is a “white hat” hacker, which means customers hire him to break into their own computers. His roster of clients has included the Pentagon, major defense contractors, Microsoft, Google, and some others he can’t talk about.

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But when he showed up, he was surprised to find himself in a conference room full of familiar faces. The Mayo Clinic had assembled an all-star team of about a dozen computer jocks, investigators from some of the biggest cybersecurity firms in the country, as well as the kind of hackers who draw crowds at conferences such as Black Hat and Def Con. The researchers split into teams, and hospital officials presented them with about 40 different medical devices. Do your worst, the researchers were instructed. Hack whatever you can.

‘Cryptopalypse’ Now: Looming Security Crisis Could Cripple Internet

The Internet, and many forms of online commerce and communication that depend on it, may be on the brink of a “cryptopalypse” resulting from the collapse of decades-old methods of shared encryption.

The result would be “almost total failure of trust in the Internet,” said four researchers who gave a presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas earlier this month.