Carl Herberger of Radware writes: If someone locked down your pacemaker, what would you pay to regain control? If hackers took over a cockpit or locomotive, what would you pay for restitution? This is the future of ransomware that we’ll almost certainly see if the evolution of these threats holds course. Any time human safety…
Category: Of Note
OHSU pays nearly $3 million over two data breaches in 2013
Lynn Terry has the scoop on what appears to be a new HHS resolution agreement. There’s nothing up on HHS’s site or in my mailbox yet about this one, but I had covered the four breaches mentioned in her report as well as a more recent breach (search OHSU). Oregon Health & Science University has…
Healthcare Sector Under Attack? Yes.
From a new report by InfoArmor: InfoArmor has identified a group of bad actors performing targeted cyberattacks on healthcare institutions and their IT infrastructure, including connected medical devices such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging systems (MRI), X-ray machines and mobile computing healthcare workstations. This group of bad actors has performed at least four successful attacks against…
9th Circuit: It’s a federal crime to visit a website after being told not to visit it
Orin Kerr writes: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has handed down a very important decision on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Facebook v. Vachani, which I flagged just last week. For those of us worried about broad readings of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the decision is quite troubling. Its reasoning appears…
IoT Medical Devices: A Prescription for Disaster
Tom Spring reports: Late last month, TrapX Labs’ security team spotted an uptick in the prevalence of a new more virulent strain of malware targeting hospitals and their IoT equipment. Researchers discovered attackers targeting unpatched medical equipment running Windows XP and Windows 7 with variations of attacks such as the Conficker worm, long thought obsolete. The…
Reps. Lieu and Hurd urge ransomware events to be reported under HITECH
Representatives Ted W. Lieu (D | Los Angeles County) and Will Hurd (R | San Antonio) sent a letter to Deven McGraw, Deputy Director of the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) encouraging the office to focus on developing guidance for health care providers to respond to ransomware attacks under…