Zombie OS lurches through Royal Melbourne Hospital spreading virus The pathology wing of the Royal Melbourne Hospital in the Australian state of Victoria is suffering from an virus infection on its Windows XP PCs. The hospital runs one of the southern state's largest networks and emergency departments. Its blood bank has fallen back to manual processes for processing blood, tissue, and urine …
Aha! read this one on the age at 10:30 last night and just shook my head.
Was waiting, just waiting for it crop up on El Reg.
I hope whoever claims IT responsibility gets a foot-up-arse. Ideally more than once.
I bet they are on a pretty pay packet too.
And bollocks to there wasn't enough money or what ever the lame excuse it is they may have for running these 15 year old os'.
No excuse for someone who gets paid a fuck ton of money to be running these machines in production environments.
There but for the grace of god. I work for the NHS and my department holds large amounts of patient gynaecological/sexual health data (so not sensitive at all) and after I raised blue murder (I am not even the IT guy here) we finally got our W7 Enterprise workstations late last year, thank goodness. I got glazed looks from senior management when I highlighted the problem. Luckily they picked up words like "compliance" and "Caldicotte Guardian" though and to be fair they turned the super tanker around at almost large-frigate speed, bless 'em. Better late than never. I think we are still on IE8 or 9 though but you cannot have everything and I am sure it is next on the list (or we switch to Chrome). Another impressive thing about (at least where I work) is that no one has USB sticks, IM etc. We even have to surrender & shred any printout with patient data at all before we clock-off. It is not all bad!*
I'll make my bosses they get to look at the above article to reinforce the wisdom of not rolling the dice.
*That will have jinxed it: massive NHS patient data breach due in under 48 hours. :(
This post has been deleted by its author
@Phil Kingston
When most of the rest of us were using Windows 2000, XP, or even 7, I was asked to install our specialist shrink-wrapped software on a couple of non-critical PCs on a network in one of the main WA hospitals. Our software would not install, as their SOE used Windows 95 with Netware, which we no longer supported. I was, as a special case concession, allowed to upgrade the OS to Windows 98SE.
I am hoping NSW is not so bad simply because a few months back I ran into one of the contractors that did major upgrades to my Uni's systems several years ago* and he said his crew were being kept very busy up and down the coast doing hospital PC and infrastructure upgrades.
Can't speak for the hospitals, but the team got a lot of experience with modenising ancient computers hooked up to archaic and long-unsupported equipment at the Uni. (hence the need for contractors on top of the regular IT unit).
*I was a contractor on that team too at the time, but the Uni. picked me up full-time for a non-related tech role out in the faculties.
for another jump in the pricing of Affordable Health Care. All that expense has to be paid for somewhere, between drug companies thinking that they should increase the price on 60 year old pill compositions and the need to flush current technology out the door every 3-5 years in order to keep ahead of computer criminals. Next time you want an explanation on where the health industry is headed, go flush a toilet and observe the swirl.
Now they've spent a sh!tload on manual fallback, and are preparing to pay ransom money for XP crap, and now the public embarrassment and loss of confidence to the public, perhaps they could actually spend funds on UPGRADING the systems.
Yeah, yeah, I know some old physical kit may well have some "turnkey" XP back end that can't be decoupled from it. If it hasn't reached the end of life, isolate those consoles from any network and superglue the usbs and CDs. For anything else that isn't attached to your multi-million dollar MRI machine that is currently mid-life, UPGRADE.
(Yes, I know what it's like ferreting out old applications, asking the vendor if there's an upgrade, purchasing and implementing said upgrades (or writing new code), and migrating data, but that can all be done if tackled incrementally and thoroughly. And sometimes the solution is better, if you actually spend some time on requirements analysis first, ha! ha! ha!).
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