If they’re caught, they should be draw and quartered and their heads stuck on pikes.
Hey, just be glad I didn’t tell you what I really think of hackers. I mean they are almost as bad as insurance companies!
Why would anyone click any attachment that hasn’t been screened by anti viral?
As for, I guess that rule about employees not using hospital computers for non work purposes will be getting some teeth soon.
Hackers have many avenues of attack that don’t rely on e-mail attachments at all.
The most effective hacks usually use social engineering. “Hello IT Bob? This is Director Jane. I’m on vacation but have been told that I need to remote in to finish filing our federal exemption paperwork. My account is locked because I haven’t updated my password. Can you change it to 123WXYZ? Thanks! You’re the best!” Or simply walk by one of the many publicly accessible PCs and plug in a key-logger/virus payload from a USB key. Sadly, it’s easy-peasy.
Hospitals and medical-device companies typically have horrible, horrible security. (Partly because doctors are too important to use real passwords or secure authentication tokens, partly because so does the rest of corporate america.)
I want the ransomware asswipes heads on pikes, but I also want a random half-dozen of the top three management levels at Medstar to spend 5-10 in federal prison. Just to encourage the others.
Monday’s hacking at MedStar comes one month after a Los Angeles hospital paid hackers $17,000 to regain control of its computer system, which hackers had seized with ransomware using an infected email attachment.
You know given all the horrible things that could result from fucking with a hospital’s computer systems the fact that whoever did this was willing to risk all that for just $17,000 almost makes it worse. Assholes.
…Hospitals Paralyzed…
Kind of seems like a poor word choice
The electronic health records programs in the US are among the many catastrophes of the US health care system that few people know about. The EHRs used by hospitals and outpatient medical services are inefficient, poorly designed, dysfunctional, fractured and, as we can see here, not very secure.
EHR systems in the US don’t even need hackers to go down. They crash all the time on their own leaving hospitals completely in the dark for hours if not days at a time. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that these record system are responsible for a number of errors that have led to a several patient deaths. Hospitals are pretty good at keeping those issues out of the public eye, though.
Good thing we got rid of those bulletproof Mainframe systems and started using Windows for everything.
It’s terrorism, pretty much any way one defines the word.
I want to see these fuckers in prison.
You sound knowledgeable. If it’s this easy, gotta wonder whey IT people haven’t plugged some of these holes.