13 ms·
I created this anon account because I don't want to lose my job. I work at a major hospital/university as a research engineer and, 100%, the whole system is co
by tokeepmyjob 7y ago
I created this anon account because I don't want to lose my job.
I work at a major hospital/university as a research engineer and, 100%, the whole system is completely broken. Using our hospital and the 10 or so other major hospitals we work with as my source, I cannot come to any other conclusion.
HIPAA is constantly touted as the reason to push more and more CYA hurdles on to the staff's day to day interactions. One of the hospital I work with has an email system where you receive a notification (via email) that you have a message from xyz@majorhospital.com, in the body is a link you have to click through to reach a "secure" portal, then you 2FA, just to read an email someone sent _you_ (with no PII).
While the system that actually handle all the PII are basically rubber stamped with no real security reviews. Prototypes I've built that should never pass a security review, regularly do and get let out into the wild. I've been screaming from the top of a mountain for years and all I ever hear back is that it would cost too much, or prolong the dev cycle, or <enter reason here>. If I counter with "I can't believe this will pass HIPAA muster," the answer is always the same: "It passed the review and that is what matters."
When that something eventually happens, we can say we went through the proper vetting with the review team and that's it, next to no liability for building crap infrastructure. Of course the security review team will say, they used an analysis software that cleared everything so it's not their fault. Finally the company that made that software will say it's not perfect, but it got certified by XYZ, and just like that the whole thing blows over.
The hospital itself is what facilitates this shifting of responsibility, they pays millions upon millions of dollars for any software claiming to securely retain and protect PII, when all to often that software isn't even in beta, let all vetted and hardened. But hey, they got some certification that the hospital can point to and say "It wasn't us." Every year there is some new thing we are supposed to do that feign interest in security, but the weakest links just keep getting weaker. No one cares about your personal information, hospitals only care that they aren't liable when your personal information getting leaked.
I literally lie to my doctor, not because I don't trust her, but because I know that it's just a matter of time before my information is out there.
- cwarzel 7y agohey — i'm a journalist at the New York Times. I'd like to chat more about this with you if you're interested. you can reach me at charlie.warzel@nytimes.com or via protonmail cwarzel@protonmail.com
- neoburkian 7y agoStuff like this is everywhere. I used to work for a company that had millions of credit profiles. We had the chief of IT spending enormous amounts of time to make things "secure," but in the meantime junior PMs (and pretty much everyone else too) had access to a web portal where they could decrypt and inspect anyones credit information, address, name, etc. Inspecting the personal financial details of people in our system was something employees would do on a lark. We had a horrible password manager that nobody used, so the passwords that were employed to validate logins to this portal were literally the names of the employees with one or two extra characters. No 2FA, no IP address restriction, nothing. We would deploy enormous resources to protect something if IT believed that had a legal requirement to do so (and make a lot of noise about how "secure" we were), but we would leave treasure chests of information sitting around in the open if there wasn't a box they needed to check saying "don't leave unattended treasure chests of private data in the open." If anything this convinced me that the regulations surrounding this sort of thing are a joke. We don't need rules about security or how to build X - IT will just see a list of boxes, check them, and then ignore everything not specifically enumerated. We need a white hat law for certifying hacking teams that can legally try to crack corporations with sensitive data. If they succeed, the company has to pay enormous fines _to the team that hacked them_ and solve the problem or get their certifications/contracts revoked.