Hackers breach plastic surgery clinic | Hacker News Reader

Hackers breach plastic surgery clinic

bbc.com

71 pointsLinuxBender16 comments

> The Dark Overlord has claimed to be behind high-profile data breaches before, including one at US media firm Netflix earlier this year.

That was not a sentence I was expecting to read today.

It's true. They're quite prolific. They hacked a bunch of medical clinics, and even HBO.

Why on earth would you keep naked pics of your clients on a computer connected to the Internet?

Not sure why you are being downvoted. But I don't expect clinics in a country without something like HIPAA in place to be overly cautious about such things.

In the country with HIPPA I would absolutely bet quite a lot of money that this is the norm as well.

I've now debugged (as a well known patient) two computer systems for local clinics - and they were completely and entirely owned from the ground up. They saw this as completely normal/routine (as in - "oh man, call the IT guy - we've been infected again!"), and I watched as they would minimize whatever medical records app they used with my info in it to pull up the toolbar-laden IE to run my credit card via an on-line processor.

Luckily in those cases it was typical malware/botnet infestation. All it takes is the wrong person/group to come across that secretary's workstation that is almost assuredly connected to the same network the random medical equipment and storage is as well.

Security/IT in general in healthcare is a complete unmitigated disaster. Everyone focuses on hospitals (for good reason) - but those are typically far better ran than your local plastic surgery/lasik/clinic practice.

I'm guessing there are at least a few employees/founders of startups on this forum who sell products that encourage this behavior.

Not too long ago I saw a straight-faced suggestion on this forum that doctors should have cameras in their offices to record all patient interactions/exams/procedures for ML purposes.

I'd be out the door immediately if a doctor ever pulled something like this.

Suggestion? This is a popular deployed product.

https://www.popsci.com/g00/google-glass-doctors-office

I'd turn right around or ask them to take their recording device from their heads.

Asking is way too polite here. No doctors who take it upon themselves to enter exam rooms with Google recording devices on their faces deserve that courtesy.

super creepy

This kind of thinking will have to become more common again. Even if you have good reasons to keep it (which is always the first question), not everything needs to be available without delay or from everywhere.

On the other hand, the clinic in question has a big "follow us live in surgery & clinic" banner with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat links on their home page...

Probably convenience. Plastic surgery clinic may not be so worried about being hacked.

> terabytes

If it's about the clinic, that doesn't ring true to me. Why would photos of the clinic's customers total to that much data? Do they have hours of 4K video on them or something?

3D pictures, like from MRIs, are big. You take a lot of them per patient. And it would be quite bad to use lossy compression on them.

From http://siim.org/?page=archiving_chapter2 :

> One example of the data generated for breast MRI can reveal the large number of sequences and significant amounts of data that are generated for what might be perceived as a “small” study. [...] A significant number of sequences and images result in an average of ~300 MB of data storage per study.

Ah, that makes sense. I hadn't thought of that type of data.

Sounds to me like a few hackers will be "chased by the paps".

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