Millions of patient scans and health records spilling online thanks to decades-old protocol bug

DICOM, the standard for sharing medical images, leaves millions of patient records exposed due to security flaws found by German cybersecurity consultancy, Aplite. Over 3,800 servers in 110 countries reveal private data of 16 million patients; 43 million health records also exposed. Majority servers are in the US; over 70% are hosted by Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Under 1% use effective security. Aplite also discovered a new attack vector, allowing data tampering in existing medical images. Implementation of DICOM's security measures could disrupt many legacy systems.

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