Holding precious information hostage with the issues of ransomware risk, cyber criminals have made a lucrative market for personal data that is even more profitable than other malware, in accordance to Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez.
Speaking at a day of September 7 FTC workshop on ransomware risk, Ramirez called it a “latest business model” for malicious task is a growing cybersecurity issue across entire industries and that no agency is immune from these types of attacks.
And the FTC chief asserts that the healthcare industry appears to be specifically susceptible to the file-encrypting malware.
“The attack or invasion on the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Southern California previously this year, the first in a string of high-profile attacks on healthcare agencies, mentions the issues that ransomware risk poses,” Ramirez informed the audience. “The perpetrators took out the hospital’s whole network for more than a week, leaving staff without approach to email and crucial patient information. The malware crippled the emergency room of hospital and other computer systems essential for sufferer care, and compelled hospital staff to log medical records with pen and paper.”
In the end time, Hollywood Presbyterian paid a ransom to the hackers of forty bitcoins, or $17,000, to restore its network operations, she stated. Ramirez also attributed a same attack in the month of March that disabled MedStar Health’s computer networks, refusing approach to email and electronic health records (EHRs) at ten hospitals in the Washington, DC place for almost 2 weeks.
She called ransomware risk “among the most troubling cyber issues” confronting the US that is “becoming immensely more pernicious” and is “escalating at an alarming amount.” Citing statistics from the Department of Justice that ransomware risks have quadrupled in the last year alone, Ramirez stated that the U.S. averages 4,000 incidents each day.
In accordance to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ransomware risk victims in the 1st quarter of 2016 alone paid attackers $209 million, and in the year of 2015 producers of the CryptoWall ransomware attack generated ransom of more than $300 million. “The economical motivation for ransomware attacks recommends that the risk is unlikely to go away any time soon,” added Ramirez.
Ransomware has the largest monetary value for cyber criminals, admits Craig Williams, senior technical leader and global outreach manager for Cisco Talos, a threat intelligence agency.
“It is actually put things on a financial scale that we just simply have never seen before,” said Williams. “The issue is not only that ransomware is economically appealing for adversaries, but provided that money, they are now able of employing professional development teams all over the globe to evolve and grow this capability to deploy malware at merely an astonishing rate.”
“I will sum it up in 1 word—it is scary,” Chad Wilson, director of information security at Children’s National Health System, informed the FTC workshop. “The number of attacks has actually grown remarkably over the last couple of years. There is not one specific vector that they are utilizing. They are utilizing several vectors to harm systems and various techniques to trick or social engineer doctors, administrators, and other folks to get on networks and access data.”
Nevertheless, Wilson further added that cyber hygiene and prevention “does a lot to eradicate the issue upfront, and then you’ve to contribute in incident response and containment techniques for decreasing the affect when something does happen.”
While physicians are concentrated principally on taking care of sufferers, he summarized that “now they have to learn that bad persons are after their data, and they require learning how to look after themselves—education does go a long way.”
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