Heartbleed To Blame For Community Health Systems Breach
An anonymous reader writes: The Heartbleed vulnerability is the cause of the data breach at Community Health Systems, which resulted in 4.5 million records (containing patient data) being compromised. According to a blog post from TrustedSec, the attackers targeted a vulnerable Juniper router and obtained credentials, which allowed them access to the network's VPN.
Oh wait, that's right, they have. Heartbleed became public in early April.
It would have been good form to update the vulnerable device. But it's not "to blame" for the data loss. The people who willfully broke in and grabbed the patient data are the cause of the loss.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The hospital had an Internet-facing router that was accessible via SSH or HTTPS?
If they were stupid enough to do that, then someone else had probably stolen all their data already.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
How does getting onto the VPN equate to accessing the secret stuff? Isn't there another layer of security?
Whatever punishment these guys ( the sys admins ) get, it won't be enough. At some point it would be nice to see people who screw up suffer the consequences.
I admin a few machines (annoying, but required). Heartbleed got so much press, I thought everyone patched all their systems within days. I did.
The Heartbleed vulnerability is the cause of the data breach at Community Health Systems
Oh no. The cause isn't a specific software vulnerability, let alone one for which a patch exists from several months now and is universally known. Don't blame Heartbleed, blame the technical stuff. Had they have adequate security and audit policies in place designed to protect the information they guard, and Heartbleed (or any other well-known exploit) couldn't have been used in the first place.
The only way to keep medical information of any type safely is to keep to paper and folder . There is no way that i will ever trust any network attached device with private medical information.
What are you hiding? Do you shit gold nuggets?
Should such data be on a network accessible from the Internet (even secured)?
It's not like having a second network dedicated to medical enterprise inter-connectivity would make much of a cost difference in the US system.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Yeah, paper is much safer because you can't just walk in and walk out with the folder.
also if they had there or some of there it farmed out to some outsourcing firms that can slow down updates / make hard to get stuff done even more so if there is a lot of contractors and sub contractors in the mix.
Yeah, paper is much safer because you can't just walk in and walk out with the folder.
But you can't walk in from Russia and walk out with 4.5 million folders either...
You can't just walk in and out if you are physically in China.
Paper records limit exposure to roughly the number of employees. Electronic records raises that level to millions from all over the world.
If you share your records in a multi-hospital system, as was the case here, then you now have exposure through multiple poorly managed IT departments.
Even in the days when you could just walk in and out with the folder, data breaches were rare. And all you could get were a few records anyway.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
What OS do their applications run on? Heartbleed didn't affect Windows, which has it's own SSL code. OpenSSL was the culprit and that's primarily used on *nix/posix systems.
This doesn't prove much of anything, but:
[user@system ~]$ curl -I www.chs.net | grep Server:
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
With always on and 0 downtime, they are the ultimate target to hack. No need for zero-day exploits. Now, one can get all the personal information they need from the most vulnerable of people. Really makes me sick.
All that hockey hullabaloo and that bitch Anne Murray too!
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
...brad porter. he pushed really hard to get junipers in to replace the cisco vpn solution. he is also keen on dragging his feet on anything that really didn't matter to him.
Clearly you don't appreciate my sarcasm. I agree with you anonymous coward.