Support Site For Hospital Respirators Found Riddled With Malware 48
chicksdaddy writes "A web site used to distribute software updates for a wide range medical equipment, including ventilators has been blocked by Google after it was found to be riddled with malware and serving up attacks. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is looking into the compromise. The site belongs to San Diego-based CareFusion Inc., a hospital equipment supplier. The infected Web sites, which use a number of different domains, distribute firmware updates for a range of ventilators and respiratory products. Scans by Google's Safe Browsing program in May and June found the sites were rife with malware. For example, about six percent of the 347 Web pages hosted at Viasyshealthcare.com, a CareFusion Web site that is used to distribute software updates for the company's AVEA brand ventilators, were found to be infected and pushing malicious software to visitors' systems."
Probably not singled out (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of sites are infected by bots who probe domains for tell-tale signs of security holes. Take a look at the logs for any website. You'll see regular GET requests from thousands of ip addresses looking for pages of well known applications (like phpmyadmin).
The site was probably running some package with a hole in it.
I run a url-shortner. Links to such compromised sites are always being further obfuscated through the shortner. It's a never ending process.
Re:They will be fine (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a contractor so yes it was past tense.
The issue I am making fun of is hospitals have LARGE amounts of devices that are internet enabled like $300,000 cat scan machines that PDF and email documents and are managed only via IE 6 as they were made in a different era when that was the gold standard before Firefox was anything but a cheap amature internet thingie a half decade ago. They almost always use very obsolete platforms with 256 megs of ram, IE 6, etc. The budget analysts folks are under heavy pressure to cut costs and IT is always the cost center at the end of day.
Worse many devices have support contracts dictating you use IE 6 or IE 7 before we will even talk to you on the phone. All equipment must be medical certified which takes years to process so they are even further behind compared to vanilla corporate America. This was the case with the EPIC project I was working on.
I was dumb founded when they had me installing XP SP 2 on these new icore 5s. At least XP SP 3 gets patches. Looking at ColdWetdog's website I believe I worked for his employer possible in 2011 early last year and maybe they did plan on upgrading. If it was in Anchorage where the center facility is based I will certainly get a good laugh :-)
If they went to at least XP SP 3 by now then that is patched I will be happy. There were no talks of that at the time as I asked the IT department WTF etc. Equipment and medical software are very very expensive and is always years behind the competition. In Canada they still use Windows 2000 and IE 5.5 web apps because it is cost prohibitive to change and things like COWS (Computer On Wheels) have very narrow specifications where the company will void your warranty if you touch it.
Locking systems down to exact time frames is wrong and is negligent in this new day and age I agree. I hope McKesson and StarChart certainly do just follow standards as hospitals should be more state of the art in technology and not techno-phobic so to speak. WIth such pricy and expensive testing it makes sense to keep the budget to hire more nurses and doctors than to keep IT going if their systems are just something a secretary uses to remind patients when their next appointment is. The medical database project at least tied all of Alaska, Washington, and Oregon together with a unified patient record which now makes IT a lot more important.