How to hack any hospital computer
-Use the password taped to the monitor
How to hack any hospital computer (L337 version for advanced security systems)
-Use the password taped to the back of the monitor
As a computer guy: This is what happens when you have too much security. It reaches a tipping point and then suddenly you have none. Security at the cost of convenience comes at the cost of security.Ā Ā
This is true of so many things in healthcare.Ā Example: our software is designed to automatically alert the doctor if a patientās vital signs are critically out of range.Ā If someone has a blood pressure of 200/130, the doc gets a pop-up box that they have to acknowledge before doing anything else.Ā It makes sense, in our setting.
But then some mega-genius upstairs realized something: the system was only alerting for critical vital signs, but not for all vital signs that could possibly be bad.Ā Like, yeah, 200/130 is potentially life-threatening, but 130/90 is above ideal and can have negative effects on health.Ā Should the doctors be allowed to just ignore something that could negatively affect a patientās health?Ā Heavens no!
So now the system generates a pop-up for any vital signs that are even slightly abnormal.Ā A pressure of 120/80 (once considered textbook normal, now considered slightly high) will create the pop-up.Ā We have increased our vigilance!
Well, no, what weāve actually done is train doctors to click through a constant bombardment of pop-ups without looking.Ā Weāve destroyed their vigilance and made it much easier for them to accidentally skim past life-threatening vital signs.
But you canāt tell that to management, because youād have to confess that you are a flawed human with limited attention resources.Ā Theyād tell youĀ āwell, all the other doctors take every abnormal vital sign seriously, it sounds like youāre being negligent.āĀ And if youāre smart, you back down before you start telling the big boss all about your habit of ignoring critical safety alerts.
The end result is exactly the same as if we had no alerts at all, except with more annoying clicking.
The other issue is that most computer security is designed by people who will never work the jobs if those using their security systems.
No nurse has the mental bandwidth to remember 15 different passwords to 15 different computers. They have to remember which patients need what, whoās getting what medication when, whoās allergic to penicillin, and a million other things. Of course the passwords are going to be written on a piece of paper by the computers, they need to move fast.
My college apartment building made their fire alarms super sensitive, with the idea being that it would stop people from smoking in the units. What it actually did was set the damn things off all the time while people were cooking. So most people in the building just put cling film over their smoke alarms to stop them from reacting to regular cooking and would just take it off for an inspection.
The fire alarm story makes a really good point because, this isnāt just a problem with computer security, itās a much bigger problem of, corporate workers thinking they know better than the people who actually do the job.
I deal with this a lot, as a truck driver. Trucks are being built with a lot of new, fancy safety features that sound really nice to the corporate people who buy the trucks and the insurance companies that offer discounts for having them on the truck. The problem? All of those devices are designed, and tested, under perfectly ideal conditions and those are the only conditions they work under.
My favorite example is the system my current truck has that automatically steers the truck, if it thinks Iām too close to a line. Within the first month of having that, I nearly killed someone riding a bike because, when I merged, to go around them, the truck saw the line and tried to steer back into the lane.
The reality of these new systems is that trucks now have a lot of alarms that frequently set off when thereās not actually anything wrong. Most drivers are now constantly monitoring the ones that can be turned off, which is taking their attention away from the road. The ones that canāt be turned off, are so loud, and annoying, that weāre now seeing a major increase in drivers having anger issues (thatās not something you want a truck driver to have BTW). Meanwhile, a lot of people, in some office, are patting themselves on the back for the system they designed that works great, on a closed road, in California, in perfect weather
Iām an Uber driver, and I got dinged on a driver safety alert for braking too quickly one time.
The reason I slammed my brakes?
A piss-drunk guy ran out in front of me on a one way street downtown lmfao
I was like sure Uber Iāll just hit him next time you can handle my legal fees I guess ĀÆā \ā _ā (ā ćā )ā _ā /ā ĀÆ
