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.

Comments

Re:Restore from backup

[KGIII]

I lost data once and only once. Well, a significant amount of data. I've had crashes with not-yet-saved documents that took out trivial amounts but that doesn't even happen any more. You're not only correct, you're spot on.

One other thing to add - without verifying your backup - you have no backup at all. That includes a restoration strategy, that's part of the verification process. That includes having the ability to put a fresh system up, while the system is down, and have it isolated to access tools for recovery (such as updated patches).

My loss of data was infuriating and bizarre. I've been very anal about keeping backups ever since. To this day, even for my personal data, I keep regular updates at disparate locations and provision the same services for my friends. It's all fairly automated at this point but I still test the recovery often enough to know that I shouldn't ever lose any valuable data ever again.

Hardware, software, and bandwidth are cheap. They're cheap enough to be considered ubiquitous and there's no excuse for me to not do this. It is not expensive and doesn't even require physically moving the data on a regular basis. With a little bit of initiative, you can even automate a good portion of it. (I've not really found a good way to do the verification completely automatically from within the OS. I've not yet found one that I can really be certain of so I do verifications on my own.)