Social Engineering Tactics Targeting Healthcare & Public Health Entities and Providers


Access to employees’ email accounts, and then pivoted to specifically target login information related to the processing of reimbursement payments to insurance companies, medicare, or similar entities.

To gain initial access to victim networks, the threat actor acquired credentials through social engineering or phishing. In some observed instances, the threat actor called an organization’s IT Help Desk posing as an employee of the organization, and triggered a password reset for the targeted employee’s organizational account [T1566.004]. In some instances, by manipulating the IT Help Desk employees, the threat actor was able to bypass multifactor authentication (MFA) [T1556.006]. In another instance, the threat actors registered a phishing domain [T1556.001] that varied by one character from the target organization’s true domain, and targeted the organization’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) [TA1656].

Read more…
Source: U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Cyber Division


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • A bug in an Irish government website exposed COVID-19 vaccination records

    March 14, 2024

    Two years ago, the Irish government fixed a vulnerability in its national COVID-19 vaccination portal that exposed the vaccination records of around a million residents. But details of the vulnerability weren’t revealed until this week after attempts to coordinate public disclosure with the government agency stalled and ended. Security researcher Aaron Costello said he discovered the ...

  • US health department opens probe into UnitedHealth hack

    March 13, 2024

    The U.S. government on Wednesday said it has opened an investigation into the cyberattack at UnitedHealth Group’s Change Healthcare to find out whether there was a breach of protected health data and if the company followed U.S. health privacy law. It is the first announcement of a probe by the Department Of Health and Human Services ...

  • Capita shares sink as outsourcing giant swings to £107m loss, takes £25m hit from cyber attack

    March 6, 2024

    Capita has incurred £25.3m in costs tied to a cyber attack last March as the outsourcing giant swung to an annual loss and ramped up its cost-cutting programme. Shares fell 16 per cent on Wednesday morning. The group, which runs key local government, military and NHS services, posted a pretax loss of £106.6m for 2023, compared ...

  • Hacker forum post claims UnitedHealth paid $22 mln ransom in bid to recover data

    March 5, 2024

    A post on a hacker forum popular with cybercriminals has claimed UnitedHealth Group opens new tab paid $22 million in a bid to recover access to data and systems encrypted by the “Blackcat” ransomware gang, according to two researchers. Neither UnitedHealth nor the hackers involved have commented on the alleged ransom payment, but a cryptocurrency tracing ...

  • US prescription market hamstrung for 9 days (so far) by ransomware attack

    March 1, 2024

    Nine days after a Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate took down the biggest US health care payment processor, pharmacies, health care providers, and patients were still scrambling to fill prescriptions for medicines, many of which are lifesaving. On Thursday, UnitedHealth Group accused a notorious ransomware gang known both as AlphV and Black Cat of hacking its subsidiary, Optum. ...

  • #StopRansomware: Phobos Ransomware

    February 29, 2024

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) are releasing this joint CSA, to disseminate known TTPs and IOCs associated with the Phobos ransomware variants observed as recently as February 2024, according to open source reporting. Phobos is structured as a ransomware-as-a-service ...