Hackers bring Irish Healthcare services down
Dublin — Ireland, many hospitals were locked out of their computers when Ireland’s health care system was hit by a major ransomware attack, forcing them to shut down a majority of their IT systems on Friday, in what could be labeled as the worst cyberattack in the country’s history.
Ireland’s health service executives decided to shut down most of its IT systems as a precaution against further spreading of the malware once the ransomware attack began. As a result, several hospitals across the country suddenly found themself unable patients’ records, appointment booking, and email systems, forcing them to cancel most non-urgent appointments along with some other specialist consultation like cancer. As a result, hospitals are forced to use pen and paper to continue their operations.
Further, the ransomware attack has caused significate disruption in Ireland’s efforts against Coronavirus, affecting their covid testing program cause delays for the patients in getting their reports.
The Health Care Services, National Cyber Security Center, and police are working tirelessly to determine the extent to which the data may be compromised.
The standard approach attackers use in these attacks is called a “double extortion” attempt, where the hackers withhold the information and threaten to publish or sell the data online to third parties if the ransom is not paid.
While the Irish government has decided not to pay the ransom claiming that the data is not always returned once the ransom is paid. Further, they are confident that they have secure backups of all their infected that they are now using to rebuild their IT infrastructure slowly. But it will take days before the system can fully come online and function normally.
Since the beginning of the pandemic last year, cyberattacks in the health care sector have risen significantly. For example, a hacker in October blackmailed thousands of Finnish patients after hacking into a counseling center and making away with their counseling notes. In addition, two hospitals in France were attacked with ransomware in the same week in February, and a Russian gang was suspected when several hospitals were attacked in the US last year.
The health care industry has always been amongst the favorite of hackers for a variety of reasons:
- The lack of essential security awareness among the practicing healthcare staff.
- Lack of cybersecurity infrastructure present to secure their networks.
- Medical databases contain tons of information, including insurance records and financial data, that are ripe for fraud, theft, and sale on the black market.
- Connecting pre-IoT (Internet of Things) age devices to the internet that are not password-protected.
Central connected servers are incredibly tempting targets as they not only have a massive amount of data available, they can also cause a considerable number of operational disruptions that can affect an entire country. In the present where your country’s (India) healthcare system is already pushed beyond the limit, such an attack, especially towards our critical medical supplies like medicine or oxygen cylinders which are scarce as is would break our healthcare industry easily wreak havoc causing untold amounts of deaths forcing our government in paying ransom where lives could be at increased risk for each minute the data is not accessible.
Cybersecurity experts believe the root cause behind most of the attacks in the medical industry is the use of legacy systems. These old computers are too slow to run new operating systems, so to keep them running, hospitals use older versions of these operating systems that are full of known vulnerabilities that attackers can easily exploit.
The attack on the Irish healthcare system has once again shown us how disruptive ransomware is to any industry. While a complete overhaul of cyber networks is expensive and takes time, some preventive measures like applying regular security patches and updating your systems frequently can quickly increase the security of your networks.
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Sources:
Disruption will ‘go well into this coming week’ — HSE (rte.ie)
‘It’s getting worse’: Irish hospital hack exposes EU cyberattack vulnerability — POLITICO
Ireland’s health service hit by ‘significant’ ransomware attack — ABC News (go.com)
HSE examines extent to which patient records were compromised in cyberattack (irishtimes.com)
