Hospital Pays to Restore Systems After Ransomware Attack

This article from the Healthcare IT News highlighted a few topics we touched in this class.

According to the article the attacks were “carried out on Oct. 1 and involved Ryuk ransomware code, a malware that contains several bugs, resulting in damage about one in every eight files that it encrypts.”

According to a report released by Emsisoft, in the first nine months of 2019, at least 621 “government entities, healthcare service providers and school districts, colleges and universities” have been subject to ransomware attacks. Emsisoft also found that 491 of the attacks were on healthcare providers, the security firm warned that attacks on managed services providers (MSPs), are on the rise and that average ransom demands are climbing, encouraged by payouts similar to this one.

The FBI issued a warning on Oct. 2 highlights the ransomware attacks are “becoming more targeted, sophisticated, and costly, even as the overall frequency of attacks remains consistent,” the warning also points out that in some cases, even when victims who paid the ransoms were never given a decryption key.