The article's pretty scary. It boils down to this: there are multiple vulnerabilities that can lead to catastrophic breach, hospital cybersecurity is almost nonexistent, and the consequences vary, from bitcoin highwaymen to purpose-built government malware designed to create false diagnoses. Hospital tech is basically a big, expensive black box to the people who rely on it every day, for everything. It can't be replaced easily, it can't be upgraded easily, and to date the focus has been on protecting client personal information, rather than protecting the tech itself. After all, you can be fined for a data security breach. For now, at least, nobody's tried to sue a hospital because its cybersecurity negligence caused permanent health injury - or worse.
How to gamify this?
Consider Night's Black Agents. There are several vampire types - Damned, Supernatural, Alien, Mutant. It's reasonable to presume that Damned and Supernatural types don't interact at all with hospital tech. There's no real biology there - it's all beyond the reach of modern science. However Alien and Mutant types must have some kind of biology, different though it may be. Renfields and other human cut-outs would definitely be affected. Then, of course, there's the Nodes.
With that in mind, some story ideas:
Primary Caregiver: The Beacon Institute is a national, potentially international, Conspiracy Node which poses as a scientific research organization, run by a charity, whose mission is to investigate and cure obscure blood disorders. It keeps a hack team on the books, whose purpose is to spread malware throughout all the hospitals in the country. That malware 'identifies' obscure blood disorders, feeding false diagnoses to selected patients. Those patients can only be treated with drugs issued by a Beacon cutout, but the drugs make the patient seem as if they have symptoms. Patients suffering from these symptoms eventually come knocking on Beacon's door - at which point they vanish. All this is done to secure blood donors for the Conspyramid, either as some sort of long-term scheme involving blood type McGuffins, or for some other reason. Perhaps particular blood types are tastier, or perhaps the vampires have a pressing need for blood in large quantities on demand. Perhaps the vampires use this to lure important targets into the Node's clutches, where they can be Renfielded.
Enemy Of My Enemy: Rogue vampire-hunters have seeded hospitals throughout the country with malware, to identify Renfields, and possibly also vampires, if their biology can be analyzed by human technology. The vampire hunters then track the targets, capture them, interrogate them, and kill them. The problem is, this system throws up a number of false positives, people who have nothing to do with the Conspyracy but whose quirky biology make them seem to have the taint. The agents are alerted when someone close to them turns up dead, apparently the victim of a medical 'accident.' Dracula Dossier Variant: as above, except the system is more sophisticated, and run by Prince. She's using malware developed by friends in Israel to carry out the con. If the agents are Edom, then she's using them to distribute the malware and further investigate the targets after they've been identified by the malware.
Caught in the Middle: Third party hackers based in Ukraine get more than they bargained for, when malware the group uses on hospitals turns up at a Node caregiver facility. The hack group just wanted bitcoin, but it ended up with several GB worth of Conspiracy data and a hit squad. The data's out there on the net, nested in a neutral hospital database. The hack team wanted to sell it to the highest bidder, but now most of them are dead and the rest in hiding. Which hospital has the data? Can the agents get to it before the Conspyracy does? Maybe if the agents can track down the surviving hackers they might get a jump on the vampires, but that means a trip to Luhansk, currently held by the People's Republic.
That's it for this week! Enjoy.
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