While I was at the recent PHI Protection Network conference, I had an opportunity to speak with Ben Stone, Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s Pennsylvania Cyber Squad. One of the questions I put to him was why the FBI had been advising companies to pay ransomware demands. Special Agent Stone told me that that wasn’t…
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MedStar Health hit by virus affecting system
So no sooner do I get done updating the Mercy Iowa City breach that involved a virus infection of their system, then I see that MedStar Health in Washington also suffered a breach due to virus infection. John Cox of Washington Post reported: A virus infected the computer system of MedStar Health on Monday, forcing…
Some previously unreported breaches
Maryland’s Attorney General’s list for 2015 contains over 500 breach reports, many of which were never covered by the media. Here are two involving health or medical entities or health data, followed by some from the education sector that you may not have known about: Dharani Jasthi DMD PC dba Today’s Dental Associates reported that they: received an…
Hackers hold German hospital data hostage
DW reports that the ransomware problem we’ve seen here and in Australia has also hit German hospitals: It probably came down to a swift response that averted major damage in the Lukas Hospital in Germany’s western city of Neuss. One morning, hospital staff noticed the system wasn’t running smoothly anymore. There were error messages popping…
Horry County Schools approves paying computer virus ransom
WBTW reports that a South Carolina school district is paying a ransom demand because they have no way to access 25 servers with elementary school data after their system was locked up by ransomware: The Horry County school system remains locked out of several servers after a ransom computer virus got into the system last week. Charles…
Smut-viewing Android apps actually steal your data
John Leyden reports: A brace of supposed porn apps for Android actually push ransomware or steal personal data from mobile device, cloud security firm Zscaler warns. One strain of Android malware scares the user with a warning screen that falsely accusing them of watching images of child abuse. After installing the app on a device,…