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

Contents of warning email from "CERT"

[JoeyRox]

To Hospital Facility,

Hello, my name is Mandori Tugelli, and I am a foreign national from the country of Nigeria. With great sadness and events my great uncle has passed away. To help in my sorrow I have learned that my uncle has left me a very large inheritance. Unfortunately to collect this money I require the help of a USA business such as yours because my uncle left all his funds in US Dollars. If you could kindly click the link provided below and fill out the banking information for you business I will gladly offer you 50% of the proceeds for helping me collect my inheritance.

Kind Regards,

Mr. Mandori Tugelli

Interesting

[The-Ixian]

I happened to be watching broadcast TV yesterday and I saw a PSA put on by some kind of law enforcement organization.

The PSA was about public wifi hotspots and told people to turn off their wifi when they leave the house and if you do connect to a public wifi hotspot, don't do e-commerce or other sensitive transactions.

I was floored. It was such a good and informative message I couldn't believe its source.

Perhaps there is a governmental push for these types of messages now...

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.

Re:So Govt Can Hack Phones But Not Ransomware

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Have you ever thought that the government is running the ransomware gang? It's more or less the same as the IRS. Unfortunately the woman at the IRS running the scheme plead the 5th Amendment before Congress, before she jumped out of Tante Ju with a golden parachute . . .