To get its data systems back and working the Los Angeles hospital hit by hackers for ransom has paid them off to the tune of about $17, 000, according to Katie Dvorak, writing for FierceHealth IT. The hospital attacked is Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. It’s CEO, Allen Stefanek, said in a statement that, “The quickest and most efficient way to restore our systems and administrative functions was to pay the ransom and obtain the decryption key.”
The medical center had been hit on February 5, 2016 with an attack that left employees without access to the hospital’s electronic health record system and email for more than a week. Such attacks are not uncommon. Dvorak quoted an FBI spokeswoman who said that ransom-ware is becoming a rising security concern in healthcare and that the Titus Regional Medical Center’s electronic health record system was made inaccessible by a similar attack.
The Titus Regional Medical Center (TRMC) is located in Mount Pleasant, Texas. TRMC CEO John Allen said the hospital experienced a network issue that was revealed about 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 15, 2016. The malicious virus encrypted files on several of the TRMC database servers and denied physicians, administrators and staff access to vital, critical computer files including medical records, laboratory, pharmacy and imaging orders.
Titus’s team stayed onsite 24 hours per day over the course of several days to ensure patient care and safety while simultaneously working to restore systems. TRMC management hired a company called Kroll to conduct a forensic investigation. Kroll is an international technology intelligence and information management company with offices in North America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America.
While the systems were being worked on and TRMC’s management assessed damages, the hospital system was forced to resort to pre-1970, paper-based systems.
According to the FBI and other security agencies, these kind of ransom-ware attacks are on the rise.
