Wednesday, December 18, 2024
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The touch of death

I work in a medical facility where we run a few procedure rooms for operations, etc.  The PCs in the room are outfitted with a large 40″ medical grade LCD screen for viewing high-resolution diagnostic images and/or X-Rays.

At the time of this story, the screens were about 6 years old, and they have seen their share of operation (pun intended) over the years it has been in service.  The displays are always on, even when in standby mode, so the physical power switches don’t get much use.

In any case, we have third-party equipment support techs come into the ORs to insure their equipment works properly during an arthroscopic procedure (for example).  These support guys are often standing at the ready during these procedures, so sometimes they are there waiting for something to happen.

Apparently, wanting to be helpful, this equipment support tech decides that they needed to stream some Pandora into the OR.  Rather than maybe using a mobile phone, or asking IT to set it up, he just searches the Internet for Pandora.  And, instead of going to Pandora.com, he clicks on the first link he sees, not Pandora.com, which brings the OR screen to a site that loads up a browser hijacker, various porn pop-ups and fake AV – all in the middle of a procedure with a patient lying on the table.

So, a picture of a well-endowed naked woman pops (and I’m told filled the screen) up on the 40″ LCD and no one knows what to do.  The surgeon just tells him to switch it off, which he does.

However, since this power switch hadn’t seen action in…who knows how long – – the daughterboard for the switch completely fizzled out and killed the monitor for the next two months (due to other issues, we had troubles getting a repair done).

As a result, we locked the PCs down, installed Logitech Squeezeboxes in all our ORs and forbade third-parties from touching our computer equipment.

Picture Source: [JeremyMcWilliams (CC)]

 

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