Tag Archive for: hospitals

England hospitals hit by coordinated ransomware attack

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Hospitals across England have fallen victim to what appears to be a coordinated ransomware attack that has affected facilities diverting patients to hospitals not hit by the malware.

The attackers are asking for $ 300 in Bitcoin to decrypt affected machines, payable within 24 hours or the ransom doubles. If the victims don’t pay within seven days, they lose the option to have the files decrypted, according to U.K. press reports.

While multiple healthcare facilities have been hit, the country’s health service says other types of groups have also fallen victim.

According to The Register, a spokesperson for the country’s National Health Service’s digital division said: “The investigation is at an early stage but we believe the malware variant is Wanna Decryptor.” The spokesperson said the attack was not specifically targeted at the NHS, but affects organizations across a range of sectors, but didn’t specify which.

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Network World Tim Greene

Tanium exposed hospital’s IT while using its network in sales demos

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Enlarge / Orion Hindawi, co-founder and chief technology officer of Tanium Inc.

Information security company Tanium is a relatively well-established “next-generation” cybersecurity vendor that was founded 10 years ago—far ahead of the wave of the venture capital-funded newcomers, like Cylance, who have changed the security software space. (Tanium has reached a market valuation of more than $ 3 billion, though there are no indications of when it will make an initial public offering.)

Starting in 2012, Tanium apparently had a secret weapon to help it compete with the wave of newcomers, which the company’s executives used in sales demonstrations: a live customer network they could tap into for product demonstrations. There was just one problem: the customer didn’t know that Tanium was using its network. And since the customer was a hospital, the Tanium demos—which numbered in the hundreds between 2012 and 2015, according to a Wall Street Journal report—exposed live, sensitive information about the hospital’s IT systems. Until recently, some of that data was shown in publicly posted videos.

In 2010, Tanium’s software was installed at Allscripts Healthcare Solutions’ El Camino Hospital (which markets itself as “the hospital of Silicon Valley”) in Santa Clara County, California. The hospital no longer has a relationship with Tanium. While Tanium did not have access to patient data, the demos showed desktop and server management details that were not anonymized.

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Technology Lab – Ars Technica

Ransomware forced hospitals to cancel 2,800 operations and shut down systems

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Ransomware forced hospitals to cancel 2,800 operations and shut down systems

Ransomware is a serious enough threat for most organisations, but just imagine if you’re in the business of keeping people healthy and saving lives.

Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.

Graham Cluley

Services slowly resume after malware strikes UK hospitals

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Hospital thumb

Services at a number of UK hospitals are slowly beginning to resume after a computer virus infected the electronic systems of their managing health care trust.

David Bisson reports.

Graham Cluley