Short Bytes: Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia was still running Windows XP and little did they know about the upcoming havoc that was going to haunt them forever. The virus which hit the Windows XP machines almost crept down the entire hospital and its different departments. However, to make things look normal, the hospital kept on claiming that everything was almost under control now, and the IT team was working day and night to get rid of the virus.
The reason behind this is Windows XP is easy to use and is compatible with most of the tools, software and devices. Users still ignore the warnings by the Microsoft until they are hit very hard. The same happened with this hospital.
So it began like this — A computer virus first hit the hospital’s pathology department. It took down most of the automatic operations and so, the staff switched over to the manual mode including blood and tissue processing. Little later, the PCs installed with Windows XP which stored the patient information were also infected. So, nurses and caterers now worked on the paper for the food service to make sure that each patient receives the proper meals.
To prevent further damage, an email was sent to all the staff at the Royal Melbourne Hospital warning not to open any link or click on websites that look suspicious or ask for credentials, such as Facebook and Google.
However, to make things look normal, the hospital kept on claiming that everything was almost under control now, and the IT team was working day and night to get rid of the virus.
– the hospital said in a statement.
The IT team found it hard to remove the virus finally. On the other hand, the administration team found it hard to regulate patient medical condition as now, most of the processing tasks were performed manually by staff because of the computer outage.
Microsoft had already denounced the complete end of support for Windows XP almost 2 years ago. Recently, Microsoft stopped the support of Windows 8 as well. The users are advised to upgrade to a supported Windows version, such as 7, 8.1, or 10.
You can also keep your systems safe by installing a good antivirus and updating it on a regular basis. fossBytes advises you to follow the basic security practices to prevent your digital life from such unfortunate incidents.
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