As a government regime, do you want to build an effective surveillance system where health data on large numbers of suspects can be pulled into a data fusion system at the push of a button, once a judicial framework for rubber-stamping is in place? And do you want to be able to pressure vendors into not supporting certain types of research/analysis and even direct patient care that could be construed/presented as counter to the regime's goals?
Both of these are easier when smaller vendors are forced out and larger vendors are the only ones left standing. As such, regulatory capture becomes a mutually beneficial tool to dominant vendors and regulators alike.
There are few coincidences when lobbying is involved. Which is not to say that cybersecurity improvements aren't a good thing! But speed and mechanisms of required rollout need to be balanced. And with the numerous signatories of [0] opposing the rule and describing "unreasonable implementation timelines," it's hard to say that this is entirely done in the interest of patients.
[0] https://assets.ctfassets.net/opszt4tga0mx/4QrJlGP2EkCiZjgvGx... (2025)
You lose all your customer's data to a darknet leak? We should be taking a huge chunk out of your balance sheet.
My insurer has disclosed names, social security numbers, and ENTIRE MEDICAL CASEFILES for their entire client base more than once at this point in overlapping data breaches. Why exactly don't they owe me $10k for my trouble, or N% shares of the company? If that's too much, why do these penalties exist for knowing disclosure, if incompetence is so tolerated that knowing disclosure does no damage?
[0] https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/hipaa/hipaa-vio...
PCI-DSS still takes the cake for most oppressive rules out of all the compliance frameworks. The notion that your system might become "in-scope" is one of the scariest things you have to deal with. Avoiding this designation is almost always easier than satisfying all the controls they prescribe. Stripe & friends have it really good. I don't know who their equivalents are in the health care industry but I am certain they exist.
Basically, Visa and friends externalized their own shitty security and made every other company in the land responsible for wrapping their janky hardware in electronic bubble wrap. A real security framework would’ve said “don’t make a credit card scanner so weak that it can’t survive being on the same LAN as a printer”. Instead, the whole country has to waste billions of dollars mitigating that risk for them.
Given that downgrade attacks are a massive category of attacks for network protocols, and in fact modern protocols go to great lengths to make them impossible, that doesn’t sound very bullshit at all.
AI writing makes somewhat more sense on tech blogs. Where a business' value proposition is "I am knowledgeable and reliable about computer security", it seems unwise.
But the far more likely thing is that a medium SOC auditor, upon being told “we do our vulnerability scanning with nmap”, would say “I haven’t heard of nmap. You should use Tenable,” and if you’re letting SOC auditor drive your engineering you’d make a mistake and accidentally think that meant you needed to change your answer for SOC2 and go buy Tenable licenses.
My experience is that no, SOC2 auditors won’t consider literally any automated process of that sort as compliant. Which in no way implies the auditors are forcing you to use a licensed tool or driving your engineering.
I will stop that thread here, I don’t think that exchange is productive
The nmap thing means very little - you usually just need to have a system in place. You could build a pretty robust system with nmap as a component. But, there’s no requirement to look at it or operationalize/react to findings, and your average dentist or medical practice owner would prefer a nicer 911 than worry about your security.