Accessing Medical Files Over P2P Networks

Gov IT writes with this excerpt from NextGov: "Just days after President Obama signed a law giving billions of dollars to develop electronic health records, a university technology professor submitted a paper showing that he was able to uncover tens of thousands of medical files containing names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients seeking treatment for conditions ranging from AIDS to mental health problems. ... The basic technology that runs peer-to-peer networks inadvertently exposed the files probably without the computer user's knowledge, Johnson said. A health care worker might have loaded patient files onto a laptop, for example, and taken it home where a son or daughter could have downloaded a peer-to-peer client onto the laptop to share music."

Comments

Re:Wrong issue

[mc1138]

I used to work as an IT outsourcer, and security becomes a big headache with lots of Doctors. Quite often Doctors like to be able to work from home either via VPN or some other remote solution, or just taking work home with them. Then comes the problem that most of them aren't very technically inclined and/or let their kids do whatever they want. It doesn't matter how much training or what you implement, Doctor's especially those with private practices will always find a way to mess things up and pose security risks.