Months After Hacks, DHS Sends a Warning About Hospital Ransomware (vice.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Since February, at least a dozen hospitals have been affected by ransomware, malware that encrypts a victim's files until they cough up a bounty to the hackers. In response, US-CERT, the country's Computer Emergency Readiness Team, issued an alert on March 31 warning potential victims of the risks, and how to protect themselves. But, considering that some hospitals have already had to divert emergency services, push high-risk operations to future dates, and even turn away some patients, is the alert too little, too late?

Comments

STOP USING XP

[Billly Gates]

I for one refuse to work for hospitals. Not only do they treat IT like plumbers and do not respect them if they have no PHD, but they run XP SP 2 ... SP 3 might be ready someday??! They use IE 6 and IE 7. Their cisco routers are turn of the century and still BSD Unix based.

Oh and it is IT's fault if they get ransomware.

The whole FDA certification created this mess! But worse, insurance companies are nickle and diming their budgets. If XP works DON"T touch it.

If people used WIndows 8/10 (yeah it looks funny boo hiss ) with secureboot it wouldn't load half of these ransomware as rootkits could be blocked.

A lesson here for those who use XP with no updates with a smile :-) ... if it happened to them it could happen to you.