Danny Lee reports:
Four of the city’s biggest internet service providers fell victim to an international cyberattack that also affected 10,000 patients’ health records held by Chinese University.
Servers at PCCW, Netvigator, Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) and Hutchison Global Communications were among more than half a million targeted globally. The hackers succeeded in the taking hostage a couple of hundred of servers, including 14 in Hong Kong.
The telecoms firms affected hosted devices, or servers, on networks compromised by hackers called Synolocker, according to data provided by internet monitoring company Shodan.
Read more on South China Morning Post.
This is not the first time we’ve seen patient data locked up for ransom, of course. In this case, Lee reports:
The attack on the university’s faculty of medicine specifically targeted the Centre for Liver Health and Institute of Digestive Disease.
Using file encryption technology, hackers targeted servers known as network-attached storage (NAS) through vulnerability in the hardware made by Taiwanese firm Synology.
The perpetrators asked for a ransom to be paid in bitcoins worth US$350. Unless companies or individuals pay up, the data could be lost or misused by a third party.