Tag Archive for: closure

Illinois Hospital Closure Showcases Ransomware’s Existential Threat


An Illinois hospital’s decision to cease operations later this week at least partly because of a 2021 ransomware attack that crippled operations for months is a stark reminder of the sometimes-existential threat that online extortion campaigns can pose.

That’s especially true for resource-strapped small and rural hospitals.

St. Margaret’s Health (SMH) will permanently close its hospitals, clinics, and other facilities at Spring Valley and Peru, Ill. this Friday, June 16, after serving the community for 120 years. Multiple factors led to the decision, including unprecedented expenses tied to the COVID-19 pandemic, low patient volumes tied to social-distancing mandates, and staff shortages that forced the health system to have to rely on temporary staffing agencies.

But the February 2021 ransomware attack on its systems at Spring Valley had a big part to play; they  catastrophically impacted the hospital’s ability to collect payments from insurers for services rendered, and the attack forced a shutdown of the hospital’s IT network, email systems, its electronic medical records (EMR) portal, and other Web operations.

A Contributing Factor

SMH vice president of quality and community services Linda Burt says the attack lasted four months, during which employees had no access to the IT system, including email and the EMR system. 

“We had to resort to paper for medical records. It took many months, and in some service lines, almost a year to get back online and able to enter any charges or send out claims,” Burt says. “Many of the insurance plans have timely filing clauses which, if not done, they will not pay. So, no claims were being sent out and no payment was coming in.”

SMH is the latest to make the list that security analyst and researcher Adrian Sanabria maintains of organizations that were forced out of business because of a cyberattack over the past two decades. The list currently comprises 24 organizations — many of them small — across multiple sectors. Among the names in the list is payment processing firm CardSystems, which closed in 2005 following a data breach that exposed sensitive data associated with some 40 million credit cards; security firm HBGary which went…

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Ransomware attack blamed for closure of all 7-Eleven stores in Denmark


Ransomware is to blame for the closure of all 175 7-Eleven stores in Denmark on Monday.

The retailer closed all of its stores in Denmark after its cash registers and payment systems were brought down in the attack.

Initially, 7-Eleven’s Danish division did not say that ransomware was responsible for its problems, simply describing the incident as a “hacker attack”:

“We suspect that we have been the victim of a hacker attack today. We can’t use the cash registers nor accept payments. We are therefore closed until we know the extent of the attack.”

Jesper Østergaard, the CEO of 7-Eleven Denmark told a local TV station that the first indication that the company had been targeted by hackers came when staff reported that they were unable to process payments:

“The cash registers just stopped working in all the stores and the employees started letting us know. That has never happened before.”

As Bleeping Computer reports, the company has since confirmed that it was targeted by a ransomware attack, and that it is working with police investigators. Many of 7-Eleven’s stores in Denmark have since reopened.

7-Eleven Denmark is not sharing much in the way of technical detail regarding the attack, which means that not only do we not know what family of ransomware might have caused the disruption but we also do not know how it might have entered the organisation in the first place.

For instance, is it possible that all of the country’s 7-Eleven stores were seemingly impacted simultaneously because they were all reliant on the same technology – perhaps provided by a supplier who might themselves have been compromised?

In addition, there is no public word – as yet – about whether the attackers have made any ransom demands, and what 7-Eleven’s position is (Read more…)

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Houston, long a target for Chinese hackers, may face reckoning over consulate closure – Houston Chronicle

Houston, long a target for Chinese hackers, may face reckoning over consulate closure  Houston Chronicle
“chinese hackers” – read more