Kate Dubinski reports:
The College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO) has been dealing with a “cyber security incident” that may have compromised the personal information of its almost 200,000 members, CBC News has learned.
The name of the college and some of the information hackers say they have access to appears on a website associated with ransomware attacks. The information appears near a “secret data publication” countdown clock, which appears to give the college just over 12 days to respond to whatever demands the attackers have made.
The hack was discovered Sept. 8, but the college did not tell its members about it until this morning when it posted a statement on its website after being contacted by CBC News.
Read more on CBC.
As is typical of these particular threat actors, their listing provides a sample of different types of documents they exfiltrated.
The one thing the victims may have going for them is that this particular group of threat actors is really poor about following up on their dumping threats. Even when they claim to have “published” the data, attempts to download it or retrieve it often fail as the time period for the download has already expired. But it would still be prudent to assume that the threat actors will make good on their threat and will make all the data they have exfiltrated publicly available in 11 days from now. Those potentially impacted might want to take advantage of the time to set up security freezes on credit reports or change passwords on any accounts where they may have reused the same password used to login to the college.
Update and Correction: I have been informed that Canada does not have security freezes like we have in the U.S.