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I have a background in civil engineering with a focus on structural / geotechnical / construction engineering. Standards for hospitals are much stricter than th
by 3pt14159 6y ago
I have a background in civil engineering with a focus on structural / geotechnical / construction engineering. Standards for hospitals are much stricter than they are for houses. In fact, for buildings like hospitals we have specific parts of the law that limit damages. I don't know the details of this specific hack well enough to comment on where it falls on the spectrum of incompetence, but things like bollards are required by law between a hospital and a street. There are also limits on the amount that one can sue for when they're exposed.
Fundamentally though, this is a failure of the tech community to engage policy makers and a failure of policy makers to engage / listen to the tech community. It took me (and others?) years to get self-driving car regulations enacted in Canada. And even there, we're just getting started with the basics. Not enough programmers are politically engaged and the field is moving so fast that it is tough for regulators to keep up. I'm not surprised that people are dying. Quite the opposite, really. I'm surprised so few have died given how horrible our security is for industrial systems and other fuddy-duddy sub-industries of software. Yes it's a lot better today than it was five or ten years ago, but the offensive tools are much better as well. It's literally an arms race and sometimes it looks like only one side recognizes it as such.
- rayhendricks 6y agoThe circumstances that led up to this failure of organizational security are a combo of IT apathy and vendor lock-in. IMO you should not be running windows on hardware whose failure could cause deaths. Maybe windows could be secured to prevent this but that would require IT staff to keep things updated which does not always happen. A much better solution is to run locked down Linux or BSD.
- type0 6y agoNow go and try to explain that to the doctors. We all know that they could roll out Gentoo (chromebook style) and be supersecure, but the reality is nothing will change until hospitals stop using proprietary software that requires Windows.
- baash05 6y agoI can't agree with your about the tech community engaging policy makers. Every single time I've seen tech tell policy makers something is bad, or that it will work exactly the reverse of the intended, policy makers do just the thing they were cautioned against. In the last 2 years Australia (for instance) has gone against at least 3 major objections by tech. Costing jobs and security.