Slashdot Mirror
Hackers Demand $3.6 Million From Hollywood Hospital Following Cyber-Attack (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center has been hit by a cyber-attack and its systems are now being held hostage by hackers that are demanding a ransom of 9,000 Bitcoin, which is about $3.6 million (€3.2 million) in today's currency. Management has forbidden staff to turn on their computers, fearing the attack might spread, and the Radiation and Oncology departments have been completely shut down because they can't use their equipment." The staff were also forced to use fax machines rather than email, and to write down patient data on paper; patients had had to come in in person for results.
because you can always blame the hackers for their inscrutable sophistication
Hospital IT are far less organized and far less competent on average than you would expect given the nature of the business they're charged with safeguarding. The regulatory environment also disincentivizes timely patching of security vulnerabilities within devices under the stricter regulatory classes. That is to say--in a simplified nutshell--anything involved in the treatment and/or diagnosis of patients.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
"These guys are super assholes for putting patient lives in danger for a few bucks."
In fact yes.
How that hospital's management dared to have their IT forgotten, without proper budget, training, auditing and support for their staff, putting that way patient lives in danger just to save a few bucks?
IBM and Apple are partnering to create an entire new system for hospital management.
It has an extremely protected back end and a very difficult to infect front-end: The iPad.
I challenge hospitals in this country to do the switch... at least get in with a POC/Beta program.
I spent about 8 years to convince my boss to never use Windows in equipment control. The only places where Windows XP (not later) is allowed to be are the workstations of different secretaries and specialists which are too old to be retrained. So if some ransomware hits the damage is limited to the computers that are easily reinstalled from scratch.
There is the place where the ransomware can still hit: It's the SAMBA server that has shares that the ransomware can encrypt, but it presumably has a proper backup.
To do so we sometimes had to design and produce our own data collection equipment since the existing one is Windows-only.
Sorry, I have no security clearance to name our preferred OS (not Linux) and a place in the Russian military-industrial complex where I work.