During a recent visit to a local (and well-known) hospital, I happened to spy an old LA-75 printer. These were made and sold in the mid 1980s. They were considered the low-end printer, selling for $700 or so. (The letter-quality printers went for quite a bit more.)
Hospitals are health care providers, and therefore fall under HIPAA rules. HIPAA is very specific about security of patient records.
I wonder if hospitals know that dot-matrix printers are not secure? That is, there is an attack for dot-matrix printers.
By carefully recording and analyzing the sounds made by the printer, one can reproduce the text printed. The attack is called the "Acoustic Side Channel Attack". I suspect that it can be done by simply placing an Apple iPod into "record" mode and sitting it in the same room as the printer. Later, by analyzing the sound (even with background noise), one can identify the text printed during the day.
You can see more details here.
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