Keenan: Beware the ransomware that could mean life or death

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The major outage of health-care computer systems in Newfoundland and Labrador has undoubtedly damaged the health of ordinary citizens there and tarnished the province’s reputation. I have bad news for them, it could get much worse.

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I speak with some authority on this matter. My academic research field is information security. I taught what I believe was Canada’s first course on that subject on Oct. 14, 1977. From an actuarial standpoint, the pool of people who can dispute that claim gets smaller every year.

In 1984, I helped to write our country’s first computer crime laws. I have even testified before the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador in a health privacy case and analyzed the very system, Meditech, that has been attacked in the current crisis.

It appears that ransomware is very much a guy thing. Almost all of the notorious ransomware criminals who have been identified are male. At least one study showed that men are also more likely to be victims. Researchers at the École Polytechnique de Montréal found that “being a male was identified as an independent risk factor” for falling victim to most malware attacks.

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The crisis in Canada’s easternmost province concerns me greatly. Media reports say that people were sleeping on the floor in an overcrowded St. John’s emergency room. Urgent, life-saving surgeries had to be postponed.

Provincial authorities tried to be cagey about the attack. Health Minister John Haggie kept calling it “a possible cyber attack.” Deputy Premier Siobhán Coady dodged questions about whether this was ransomware in a Nov. 2 press conference. She simply repeated, three times, “We…