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Botnet Attack Shuts Down Hospital Network
aricusmaximus writes "A California student is now facing felony conspiracy charges after
unleashing a botnet attack that shut down the network of a Seattle hospital intensive care unit. This indictment comes a few weeks after another California man pled guilty to similar charges. Both attacks were attempts to make money off of adware affiliate programs. So who's really at fault here? The students? The hospital for not securing their computers and network? Or the adware companies for providing the incentive?"
I agree with much of what you say with exception of "And what kind of intensive care unit is "shut down" when they can't use computers?". The acute shortage of bedside nurses elevates computers and networks to a big player in short staffed ICU's. Patient to nurse ratios are improved because of computers. Sure the ICU can continue to function but things would be hectic and possibly deadly for some patients.
Suggesting that the hospitals are at fault for failing to secure their networks adequately is assinine. The perpetrators are at fault. Adware companies might provide incentive and the hospitals evidently need to secure their networks, too, but culpability lies solely with the two defectives who committed the crime.
I work in a hostpital as one of the business continuity team; we keep the place running in the event of something just like this, and have to evaluate the problems that'll occur in an outage if it happens.
ITU is dependant on having patient records, history, full charts and responses available in a very rapid fashion. When the computers go down, they don't stop working, just all the communications that happen near instantly suddenly have to be ordered from medical records, and use sneakernet, which is a massive time overhead. In time critical requirements, this may mean the difference between life and death.
Fair enough, the hospital should have been more secure, but there again, it all comes down to how many admins they have on the job. I know my time is allocated (still) in a very small part on security. I'm pressing to have more allocated. And my budget for security tools is small. Hell, with the NHS budget cuts next year, we'll be lucky to have much budget at all. Still, it's improving slowly. I'm still not happy with it, which gives me more incentive to work harder on it.
But anyone who would attack a hospital system has to be aware that lives are at stake here, not just a few pounds/dollars. In commercial places, I'd frequently warn people if I could work out who they were, or the admin of the sytems they came in from if I couldn't. Eventually, I'd call the police if I believed they were being too persistent, as a last resort.
In the hospital, I spot an attack, police will be warned promptly. No messing around. The place I work at saved my brother's life years back in ITU (when, by rights, his injuries should have killed him). I'm a little protective of the work they do, and the systems that let them do their job more efficiently. After all, they may just make that difference between life and death in the borderline cases, and every little win by the skin of the teeth means a lifetime to somebody.
That was just a clarification, not a dispute. I'm behind you all the way in the sentiment you express. They're in trouble, and justly so.