Cyberattack forces major US health care network to divert ambulances from hospitals
Cyberattack forces major US health care network to divert ambulances from hospitals
A major US health care system said Thursday that it is diverting ambulances from “several” of its hospitals following a cyberattack this week.
This keeps happening and has been happening for several years now; why isn’t more being done to improve security and find the criminals? I can’t walk into a hospital with so much as a pocket knife because of physical security concerns, but cybercriminals keep taking down a new system seemingly every week, and this article says the software used has been seen for years now.
The FBI et al. do try to find the guys. Arrests happen relatively frequently.
But security improvements don't happen because they cost money, and nobody is making them do it, though this is slowly changing.
I work in I.T. for a healthcare company. Ascension is a pretty large one. The bigger a company gets and the faster it grows, the more it takes on a diversity of varying technologies that all need to be managed, migrated, killed off, merged, hardened, etc. It’s a difficult job especially for healthcare. I know that the company I work for is working very hard to keep up with things, but it’s a logistical nightmare. You MUST have very smart people in charge that have the right priorities. You have to have information channels open to make sure administration knows what the potential issues are. Compartmentalization of information and access. There are so many potential points of failure it’s insane. And then there’s the most important thing of all: making sure all employees are educated enough that they don’t let their credentials get compromised.
Things are getting worse in general because of how hard it is to stay on top of everything nowadays. I just recently got a couple of letters in the mail about my info being leaked by some companies that had my info. I just have to do my part to stay on top of my own responsibilities, watch my own identity and finances, and make sure those around me are being secure, as well. Everybody needs to know how important this is, and many do, but I don’t think enough people really understand or make it a priority.
HHS is instituting new rules for healthcare (and other industries) to help track and respond to these things. The government is getting very involved with this now. I hope it helps.
I'm in IT in a healthcare-adjacent sector. Never underestimate the motivation or tenacity of foreign state actors, organized crime and chaotic neutral hacking collectives. You have limited time and budget, and both financial and risk based approval processes to deal with. They have time, ideology¹, and financial incentives.
You can't win in the face of that.
¹ sometimes it's hacking for hackings sake, but more typically it's to disrupt critical services and extort modest capital to go away. Rinse, repeat, make that bank on volume.
Fixing the issue doesn't line the pockets of investors. People aren't going to stop going to the hospital, so why fix it?
If a hospital can't operate because some asshole was able to remotely hack it bad enough to basically shut it down, we might need to rethink how things are run.
They can operate, just slower. Life threatening gets priority, the rest are diverted to nearby hospitals.
Think of when your gps shuts down. You can navigate by paper map, just slower and you need to pay more attention to avoid mistakes.
Some hospital networks just continue to operate slower to the detriment of their patients and just lie to everyone so that nobody finds out they were hacked.
This also doesn't just happen and is apparent. They probably spent way too much time trying to fix the problem before diverting to older ways while the problem is being diagnosed and fixed.
Happened in Germany recently. They could continue to operate since everything is still backed up in paper, but everything went slower and new emergency patients couldn't be accepted.
It is shocking that the digital level of the hospitals is still in the 70s.
It is about funding. The corners IT has to cut is because lack of money.
Also the amount of legacy operating system to keep hardware like scanners running is a lot. Medical devices are delivered with a workstation that never updates. It is hard to justify buying a new mri of 1.5 million when the accompanied workstation is outdated.
Sure you can vlan and firewall the hell out of it. But they still have a large attack surface.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Downtime procedures are typically when health providers revert to backup processes, including paper records, that allow them to care for patients when computers are down.
Four sources briefed on the investigation told CNN that Ascension suffered a ransomware attack, in which cybercriminals typically try to lock computers and steal data for extortion.
Those sources said that the type of ransomware used in the hack is known as Black Basta, which hackers have used repeatedly to attack health care organizations in recent years.
Senior US officials have been in repeated contact with Ascension CEO Joseph Impicciche since the ransomware attack to understand how the hack might impact patient care, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
“We are actively supporting our ministries as they continue to provide safe, patient care with established downtime protocols and procedures, in which our workforce is well trained,” Ascension said in its statement Thursday evening.
It’s only the latest major hacking incident that has hobbled a big US health care network and sent US officials scrambling to offer support.
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