Healthcare


  • Moody’s turns up the heat on ‘riskiest’ sectors for cyberattacks

    October 3, 2022

    About $22 trillion of global debt rated by Moody’s Investors Service has “high,” or “very high” cyber-risk exposure, with electric, gas and water utilities, as well as hospitals, among the sectors facing the highest risk of cyberattacks. That’s more than one-quarter (28 percent) of the $80 trillion in Moody’s rated debt across 71 global sectors, and ...

  • New York ambulance service discloses data breach after ransomware attack

    September 17, 2022

    Empress EMS (Emergency Medical Services), a New York-based emergency response and ambulance service provider, has disclosed a data breach that exposed customer information. According to the notification, the company suffered a ransomware attack on July 14, 2022. An investigation into the incident revealed that the intruder had gained access to Empress EMS’ systems on May 26, 2022. ...

  • Ransomware gang threatens 1m-plus medical record leak

    September 14, 2022

    Two recent ransomware attacks against healthcare systems indicate cybercriminals continue to put medical clinics and hospitals firmly in their crosshairs. Daixin Team has taken credit for a September 1 assault on Texas-based OakBend Medical Center, causing a shutdown of the organization’s communication and IT systems as well as exfiltrating internal data. The criminals claim to have stolen ...

  • FBI: Cyber Criminals Targeting Healthcare Payment Processors, Costing Victims Millions in Losses

    September 14, 2022

    The FBI has received multiple reports of cyber criminals increasingly targeting healthcare payment processors to redirect victim payments. In each of these reports, unknown cyber criminals used employees’ publicly-available Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and social engineering techniques to impersonate victims and obtain access to files, healthcare portals, payment information, and websites. In one case, the attacker ...

  • French hospital hit by $10M ransomware attack, sends patients elsewhere

    August 23, 2022

    The Center Hospitalier Sud Francilien (CHSF), a 1000-bed hospital located 28km from the center of Paris, suffered a cyberattack on Sunday, which has resulted in the medical center referring patients to other establishments and postponing appointments for surgeries. CHSF serves an area of 600,000 inhabitants, so any disruption in its operations can endanger the health, and ...

  • RTLS systems vulnerable to MiTM attacks, location manipulation

    August 16, 2022

    Security researchers have uncovered multiple vulnerabilities impacting UWB (ultra-wideband) RTLS (real-time locating systems), enabling threat actors to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks and manipulate tag geo-location data. RTLS technology is widely used in industrial environments, mass transit, healthcare, and smart city applications. Its primary role is to assist in safety by defining geofencing zones using tracking tags, signal ...

  • UK: Ransomware attack on NHS systems could take weeks to fix, major IT provider warns

    August 11, 2022

    A cyberattack that hit a major IT provider for the NHS and severely affected the 111 service involved ransomware and could take up to four weeks to fix, it has emerged. Advanced, which supplies vital systems for the NHS, said it suffered a cyber breach around 7am on 4 August which has now been contained. The attack ...

  • New GwisinLocker ransomware encrypts Windows and Linux ESXi servers

    August 6, 2022

    A new ransomware family called ‘GwisinLocker’ targets South Korean healthcare, industrial, and pharmaceutical companies with Windows and Linux encryptors, including support for encrypting VMware ESXi servers and virtual machines. The new malware is the product of a lesser-known threat actor dubbed Gwisin, which means “ghost” in Korean. The actor is of unknown origin but appears to ...

  • Ministers coordinating ‘resilience response’ after ‘major’ cyber attack hits NHS systems across UK

    August 6, 2022

    The Welsh Ambulance Service says the outage is significant, far-reaching and affects all four nations in the UK, but NHS England says there’s “currently minimal disruption”. People seeking medical help via the NHS 111 service have been warned there could be delays after the attack led to a “major” computer system outage. The security issue was identified ...

  • 1.9m patient records exposed in healthcare debt collector ransomware attack

    July 13, 2022

    Professional Finance Company, a Colorado-based debt collector whose customers include hundreds of US hospitals, medical clinics, and dental groups, recently disclosed that private data – including names, addresses, social security numbers, and health records – for more than 1.9 million people was exposed during a ransomware infection. In a notice posted on its website, PFC ...

  • Quantum ransomware attack affects 657 healthcare orgs

    July 7, 2022

    Professional Finance Company Inc. (PFC), a full-service accounts receivables management company, says that a ransomware attack in late February led to a data breach affecting over 600 healthcare organizations. Founded in 1904, PFC helps thousands of healthcare, government, and utility organizations across the U.S. ensure that customers pay their invoices on time. The company started notifying the ...

  • North Korean State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Use Maui Ransomware to Target the Healthcare and Public Health Sector

    July 6, 2022

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) are releasing this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to provide information on Maui ransomware, which has been used by North Korean state-sponsored cyber actors since at least May 2021 to target Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) Sector ...

  • Microsoft 365 credentials targeted in new fake voicemail campaign

    June 20, 2022

    A new phishing campaign has been targeting U.S. organizations in the military, security software, manufacturing supply chain, healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors to steal Microsoft Office 365 and Outlook credentials. The operation is ongoing and the threat actor behind it uses fake voicemail notifications to lure victims into opening a malicious HTML attachment. According to researchers at cloud ...

  • Cyber Europe 2022: Testing the Resilience of the European Healthcare Sector

    June 9, 2022

    To ensure citizens’ trust in the medical services and infrastructure available to them, health services should function at all times. If health services and infrastructures in Europe were the object of a major cyber attack, how would we respond and coordinate at both national and EU level to mitigate the incidents and prevent an escalation? This ...

  • Data breach at health care organization may affect 2 million

    June 8, 2022

    A digital attack on a Massachusetts-based health care organization may have compromised the personal information of as many as 2 million people, officials said. Shields Health Care Group Inc., which provides imaging and ambulatory surgical services at dozens of locations, said in a notice on its website Tuesday that data including names, Social Security numbers, dates ...

  • Novartis says no sensitive data was compromised in cyberattack

    June 3, 2022

    Pharmaceutical giant Novartis says no sensitive data was compromised in a recent cyberattack by the Industrial Spy data-extortion gang. Industrial Spy is a hacking group that runs an extortion marketplace where they sell data stolen from compromised organizations. Yesterday, the hacking group began selling data allegedly stolen from Novartis on their Tor extortion marketplace for $500,000 in ...

  • Healthcare organizations face rising ransomware attacks – and are paying up

    June 3, 2022

    Healthcare organizations, already an attractive target for ransomware given the highly sensitive data they hold, saw such attacks almost double between 2020 and 2021, according to a survey released this week by Sophos. The outfit’s team also found that while polled healthcare orgs are quite likely to pay ransoms, they rarely get all of their data ...

  • Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme provider breached and treating its database as compromised

    May 31, 2022

    CTARS, the makers of a cloud-based client management system used by the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) as well as disability services, out of home care, and children’s services, has revealed it was breached on May 15 and found the data posted to the dark web a week later. “Although we cannot confirm the details ...

  • UK: Phishing operation hits National Health Service email accounts to harvest Microsoft credentials

    May 5, 2022

    A phishing operation compromised over one hundred UK National Health Service (NHS) employees’ Microsoft Exchange email accounts for credential harvesting purposes, according to email security shop Inky. During the phishing campaign, which began in October 2021 and spiked in March 2022, the email security firm detected 1,157 phishing emails originating from NHSMail accounts that belonged to ...

  • Critically Underrated: Studying the Data Distribution Service (DDS) Protocol

    April 19, 2022

    Despite being unknown even to industry practitioners, the Data Distribution Service (DDS) protocol has been in use for more than a decade. This middleware software technology is responsible for running billions of public and private devices and mechanisms currently in use. DDS is integral in embedded systems that require real-time machine-to-machine communication, facilitating a reliable ...