The ECS-CERT today announced that it had discovered how cyber
attackers had managed to change
test results at the Wirths Clinic that allowed at least 13 employees of the
Bump and Grind Casino in Atlantic City, NJ to return to work last month while
infected with COVID-19. “The hackers were able to reprogram the Robotron
PrAnalysator because of access that they gained through the barcode reader that
read patient information on the sample vials being tested at the clinic,” Immanuel
C. Securitage told reporters.
Erich Mielke, spokesman for Robotron, said that their BCLesegerät
barcode reader had a feature that allowed the use of barcodes to program the communications
that the device had with various Robotron clinical devices. “In a clinic laboratory
environment, it is easier to use the barcode on a sample vial to provide
instructions for the processing of that sample rather than requiring a
technician to input the instructions at the keyboard; it increases lab thru
put,” Mielke explained.
The Clinic uses the Robotron BCLesegerät barcode reader to
read and enter patient testing data into the clinic database and to provide
tracking data to the PrAnalysator, according to the Clinic spokesperson, Aribert
Heim. “We were not aware of the feature of the reader that allowed barcodes to
be used in programming the reader.” Heim told reporters.
Jerry Catena, a spokesman for the Casino told reporters that
all testing supplies had been provided by the Clinic. “Wirths Clinic provided
the supplies and a doctor to supervise the sample collection activities,”
Catena explained; “Our first aid teams, all certified EMTs, did the actual sampling.
We have no idea how this could have happened.”
“We have confirmed that the labels on the sample tubes were
changed on about half of the samples collected at the Casino,” Clark Stanley
from the Federal Drug Administration told reporters. Half of those changed
labels would have caused a report of no virus and no COVID-19 antibodies, the
remainder would have resulted in a no virus and positive for antibodies
reporting.
The Federal Bureau of Inquiry is still investigating the
incident, according to Johnathan Quest. “We have determined that the substitute
labels were not printed on a Robotron label printer,” Quest told reporters,
“We are continuing to look at the forensics to try to determine where they were
printed.”
A total of 250 COVID-19 cases have now been traced back to
the Casino’s initial opening weekend.
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