Schrenk Consulting

Finally! A study that proves my unhealthy consumption of coffee is actually… heathly. Read on.

Turns out there seems to be a problem in the UK with shady computer repair people. Read Here.

One of the companies I worked for early in my career was owned by a man who would deliberately cause issues with his customers’ servers. Here’s a typical scenario. In the morning, to drum up business, he would remote into his customers’ servers, tweak the system somehow and then wait for the call to fix it. Then he would go onsite (he charged more for onsite), spend a couple of hours dorking around, then revert his earlier tweak.

Shortly after I started, and figure out his scheme, I installed a desktop monitor tool on his office desktop that would take screenshots every 5 secs. Once he was on the road, on his way to answer the service call, I would look at the screenshots to figure out what he had done and would roll it back. He was really puzzled why, when he arrived at the customer site, they would tell him “Oh, it seems to be working now. We don’t need you anymore.” I kept messing with him for the next month, and then got tired of it and called him on it. He was really angry, but knew that he couldn’t do anything because he didn’t want me to tell his customers. So I told his customers.

After that I lined up another job and left him with some angry businesses, but I felt vindicated in what I did. When I confronted him, I asked him why he did that since we had plenty of legitimate work to deal with. His answer, “I know how to fix my ‘breaks’, I don’t how to fix these others.”

As it turns out, the Departmart of Health and Human Services finally gave out their first HIPAA fine to Cignet Healthcare of Temple Hills, Maryland.  It wasn’t for losing patients records, killing patients or the greatest sin of all, selling customer demographic to direct marketers.  The real reason; 41 people asked for their patient records with no response from Cignet.  Then HHS asked that those records be sent to them using a subpoena.  Cignet’s repsone was to send HHS the orginal 41 patient records and then other unsolicitated 4500 records as, what can only be explained as, a huge “Up yours!”.  The lesson here is that the Federal government has a bigger middle finger.