After the Medusa gang reportedly demanded a $2 million ransom from UK healthcare and community services provider HCRG Care Group, HCRG confirmed they had a breach and said they were investigating. But they did not confirm that patient data and employee was affected and they did not confirm that files had been encrypted.
On February 23, SuspectFile somewhat remedied HCRG’s lack of transparency by reporting on exclusive data they had obtained from Medusa. The data made it clear that the gang had obtained a lot of protected health information on patients and personal information on employees, even if HCRG had not admitted it yet.
Medusa also informed SuspectFile that yes, they had encrypted files and systems.
Despite the detailed reporting, HCRG Care Group has remained quiet, not responding to inquiries asking them to respond to what Medusa has revealed and what SuspectFile has published.
Now in another exclusive report, SuspectFile reports that the breach was even worse than their initial report suggested:
On February 18, the cybercriminal group published a set of 35 images as a proof file. We initially believed these were part of the 2.275 TB that Medusa had declared as the total amount of data exfiltrated from HCRG’s servers. However, the reality is quite different, as is the context in which the data theft occurred. Medusa has informed us that the exfiltration also involved two HCRG subdomains:
- assuramedical.local
- VCL.local
As in its past reporting, SuspectFile provides screenshots consistent with Medusa’s claims. Medusa was also asked to respond to a statement recently made by HCRG to The Register. Medusa responded, “HCRG: really the fukcing liers.” It seems Medusa didn’t feel the need to use AI to help them respond to that one.
SuspectFile adds, “The ransomware group not only reiterated their previous claims—that the data had indeed been encrypted—but also revealed the actual amount of encrypted documents by one of their affiliates: approximately 50 TB, although only 2 TB had been uploaded.” Medusa provided SuspectFile with a full NTDS log of the corporate network. The blog includes redacted screenshots as proof of Medusa’s claims.
Read more at SuspectFile.
Medusa reportedly told SuspectFile that in recent days, HCRG showed up in their chat, but did not say anything. DataBreaches has no way of confirming or refuting whether that was really HCRG in the chat.
As of today, there is still no reply from HCRG Care Group or statement on their website.
SuspectFile is doing an outstanding job of reporting on this incident, but HCRG Care Group needs to get ahead of the story instead of remaining firmly behind it. Their patients shouldn’t need to get information from SuspectFile. The tagline from one of this blogger’s other sites comes to mind and might be useful for HCRG Care Group to keep in mind: “Tell the truth or someone will tell it for you.”