Patient Info is Often Leaked by Hospitals Worldwide
Hospitals are cash farms in America, but the IT department doesn’t seem to get the funding it needs to keep patients and staff secure. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to understand that when a network is insecure, everyone is at risk. It seems quite strange that surgeons, medical board members, and highly paid members of the medical community are so carefree when it comes to network security. After all, their information is on the same network as their patients.
Companies and hospitals seem to have a chronic problem of not upgrading software and hardware, even though a cyber breach costs way more than what it takes to upgrade their systems. Don’t you find it ironic that doctors spend hundreds of thousands on new iPhones and fancy Tesla cars, but don’t even notice that they’re using a decade old Dell every day? Most hospitals are (despite whatever they might tell you) for-profit, so logically it would probably be more cost-efficient to invest in the IT department before – and not after – a network breach.
We all have our aches and pains somewhere in life. When we go to the doctor to find relief, we expect a high degree of privacy. But these data breaches put our personal information online for the whole world to see. Doctors might have more resources to fight back against identity fraud, but determined criminals will find a way to exploit their sky-high lines of credit soon enough. Hopefully this will cause a change in the industry.
For everyday people like you and I however, we’re more susceptible to data breaches and identity fraud. When our information is leaked, we’re responsible for cleaning up the mess. AIDs, cancer, and other various diseases can be leaked online in embarrassing and/or shameful ways. Having a medical condition is in no way shameful, but bad people can use this information to cause harm.
Doctors can gang up and sue hospital administration under a veil of secrecy and hire expensive privacy companies to clean up after their mess afterward. But for normal civilians, our best bet is to use a service like Wiperts. We’re not made out of money, but we do have a right to privacy online and off. Using an expert service like Wiperts.com doesn’t have to break the bank. In fact, Wiperts offers affordable plans to keep your personal information off the internet.
Australia hacks its own hospitals
A government audit in Australia revealed some serious problems with hospital IT security. The government of Australia was/is wise enough to hire and authorize white hat hackers to breach critical networks related to the country’s well-being. According to The Age, the audit exposed poor cybersecurity systems among Victorian health service providers, including agencies with weak passwords. In some instances, default account names and passwords set by manufacturers, which can be found on the internet, were used by hospital agencies.
There’s an old joke on the internet that most usernames are “user” and most passwords are “password.” Sadly, this is true. Maybe in the future we’ll have USB-C flash drives that work exactly like physical keys do – but it’s 2019 already and very few people seem to use USB drives as physical keys. It’s quite strange that the general population spends thousands of hours on their smart phones while simultaneously claiming that they’re computer illiterate. It’s okay to be a bit behind the times when it comes to technology, but don’t let criminals steal from you without a fight.
