Thursday, March 28, 2024

Ransomware attack forces hospitals to abandon ambulances

Some hacks are annoying, but some can be very damaging and even potentially life threatening. Take, for example, when Eskenazi Health, an Indiana hospital, has recently forced to turn down ambulances with patients at its hospital due to a ransomware attack.
For foreigners, ransomware is an attack in which a computer system has encrypted by hackers. And the owner has to pay a ransom to get the encryption key otherwise all data has lost forever. For hospitals, this means they may be lock out of their systems and unable to download patient files. Which may contain important information such as previous medical records, allergies, etc.

In this case, the hospital tried to overtake the hackers by shutting down some of their services and operations offline to prevent further breaches. According to the hospital, patient and staff data appeared to be unaffected.

This isn’t the first time hospitals have targeted ransomware attacks. And it’s not hard to see why they could be such a tempting target. This is because the files and systems used by hospitals are critical to their day-to-day operations. And time is not always a luxury to sort through and it would be easier to pay the ransom.

Related Post: New APT hacking group targets Microsoft IIS servers with ASP.NET exploit

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