Tag Archive for: spike

Indiana companies face million-dollar decisions as ransomware attacks spike | News


FRANKLIN – In October 2021, Johnson Memorial Health went dark.

A cyberattack had infiltrated the health system’s networks and claimed to possess large amounts of patients’ personal information. The ransomware group was demanding a $3 million Bitcoin payment.

Rather than oblige, hospital administrators decided to go offline to determine the extent of the breach and prevent losing any more data, explained Dave Dunkle, president and CEO of the network.

Soon, hosptial staff were operating in the digital dark age, using paper forms to document all their procedures. Couriers scurried between departments hand-delivering blood-draw orders. With monitoring equipment down, more nurses were called in to the critical-care unit to physically observe each patient.

“It was rough,” Dunkle said. “It was very rough.”

The ransomware group never got paid, but the attack still cost the healthcare system millions of dollars to deal with the fallout. More than two years later, the hospital still hasn’t recovered financially.

“You don’t get that lost business back,” he said. “With margins being so slim for community hospitals like ours, we’re still suffering from the lost income during the attack.”

‘PAIN POINT’

Johnson Memorial Health is just one of thousands of Indiana businesses and organizations struggling to rebound after being targeted by a malware or ransomware scheme.

In recent years, the amount of money lost due to internet crimes has skyrocketed across the state. In 2019, Hoosier victims reported losing over $24 million. Last year, that number more than tripled to $73.5 million, according to data from the most recent FBI Internet Crime Report.

That’s despite the fact the number of reported cybercrime victims in Indiana actually declined by around 1,000 since 2020, when nearly 12,800 fell prey to an attack.

During the first six months of this year, insurance claims for ransomware attacks increased nationally by 27% compared to the second half of 2022, according to Coalition, a company that sells cyber…

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Finland sees fourfold spike in ransomware attacks since joining NATO, senior cyber official says


Ransomware attacks targeting Finnish organizations have increased four-fold since the Nordic country began the process of joining NATO last year, according to a senior official.

In an interview with Recorded Future News on Thursday, Sauli Pahlman, the deputy director general for Finland’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), cautioned that “correlation doesn’t equal causality,” but said he believed the surge in cases was linked to geopolitics.

Finland, which had historically declared itself to be a non-aligned country – in part due to troubled relations with Russia, with whom it shares a 830-mile border – applied to join NATO following the invasion of Ukraine.

In June, the country expelled nine diplomats from the Russian embassy in Helsinki and accused them of undertaking intelligence missions in contravention of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations.

The expulsion of alleged Russian intelligence officers throughout Europe prompted the head of Finnish Security Intelligence Service (SUPO) to warn last year that Russia would “turn to the cyber environment” for espionage due to challenges impacting its human intelligence work.

At the time, SUPO’s director Antti Pelttari said that the agency considered it “unlikely that any cyberattack will paralyze critical infrastructure [in Finland] in the near future.”

NCSC’s Pahlman echoed this position, telling Recorded Future News he didn’t “consider it very likely that we [will] really see a cyber incident in Finland that really closes down something that’s critical for society — food, electricity, water — on a wide scale.”

But the NCSC still issued a public alert last September, elevating the cyber threat level to encourage organizations and the public to be aware of the potential for disruptive incidents. The threat level “continues to be elevated as we speak, the situation hasn’t changed,” said Pahlman.

The number of cyber incidents which Pahlman said were clearly perpetrated by state-sponsored actors “has not, at least up to today, increased in a way that I could say that there has really been a step-up. [But] what we can certainly say is that the ransomware cases — which tend to have much…

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ICAC agents spread thin as cyber tips spike | News


CHEYENNE — Legislators will consider how to support the Internet Crimes Against Children task force during the interim session following reports of it being understaffed and amid a spike in cyber tips.

Members of the Joint Judiciary Committee were informed of these challenges Monday by Chris McDonald, special agent and commander of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation’s ICAC task force. He said the unit is made up of six agents spread out across three regional units, fielding hundreds of reports a year, and there has been a strain on resources attempting to handle every case.

McDonald came onto the task force in 2018, and he said there were 199 cyber tips traced to Wyoming that year.Those tips are reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for suspected child pornography and sexual assault material on social media servers — spanning platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.

In 2022, the number of tips rose to 792.

“As a unit, we received about 66 tips per month,” he said. “Another way to think about that is if you had 66, say, highway interdictions in a month, it would overwhelm the best unit.”

McDonald described responding to the tips as a call to service and reactive cases, similar to one a patrol officer might get on the street. Even though agents are not able to respond to every tip, and it doesn’t always lead to an official investigation, all tips must be vetted.

But the task force isn’t only responsible for handling cyber tips.

The commander said the unit is attempting to balance reactive and proactive responsibilities, and it’s difficult to deprioritize the cyber tip cases when it’s a “productive case.”

“When we talk about production, what would come to mind most recently is cases where individuals in the state of Wyoming are sexually assaulting children, videotaping or taking photographs of that, and then sending or trading that material with others that are like-minded,” he said. “Those are the cases that we work on a daily basis.Those are difficult when you work with cyber tips, even if it’s just a one-file cyber tip.”

He said they don’t want to…

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Ransomware attacks against US manufacturing industry spike


In late January, law enforcement officials disrupted the operations of the Hive cybercriminal group, which has profited off of a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) business model. And though the takedown was an inspiring victory, there’s plenty more ransomware where that came from. Indeed, Microsoft just reported that at the conclusion of 2022 it was t…

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