Security News

UF Health Central Florida has suffered a reported ransomware attack that forced two hospitals to shut down portions of their IT network. The University of Florida Health, also known as UF Health, is a healthcare network of hospitals and physician practices that provide care to countries throughout Florida.

New Zealand's Waikato District Health Board has been hit with a strain of ransomware that took down most IT services Tuesday morning and drastically reduced services at six of its affiliate hospitals. Phone lines went down and hospitals were forced to accept urgent patients only.

Ireland's nationalised health service has shut down its IT systems following a "Human-operated" Conti ransomware attack, causing a Dublin hospital to cancel outpatient appointments. The country's Health Service Executive closed its systems down as a precaution, local reports from the Irish public service broadcaster RTÉ said, reporting that Dublin's Rotunda Hospital had cancelled appointments for outpatients - including many for pregnant women.

Scripps Health, a hospital network based in San Diego, was hit by a cyberattack over the weekend, forcing some critical-care patients to be diverted, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Scripps acknowledged the attack in a statement but didn't specify whether it was a ransomware incident.

A Comparitech report found that there were 92 separate ransomware attacks in 2020 that had an effect on more than 600 US clinics, hospitals and organizations. "85% of ransomware attacks could be prevented in your organization if you were using MDBR because 85% of ransomware attacks are done using known ransomware domains," Mattison said.

A CCTV camera biz which left an admin account username and password exposed on the World Wide Web has, you guessed it, been targeted by hacktivists. Those cameras belonged to a whole host of organisations, according to the Bloomberg financial newswire, including: Tesla; Cloudflare; hospitals; police stations; prisons and, allegedly, more.

A hospital in southwest France has seen some of its IT systems paralysed by a "Ransomware" cyberattack, its management said Tuesday, the third such incident in the last month. Hospital workers have had to revert to working with pens and paper, since digital patient records are not available.

The Center for Internet Security, a non-profit dedicated to securing IT systems and data, has announced the launch of free ransomware protection for US private hospitals through the Malicious Domain Blocking and Reporting service. "This capability can block the vast majority of ransomware infections just by preventing the initial outreach to a ransomware delivery domain," as CIS explains.

The Center for Internet Security is launching a no-cost ransomware protection service, Malicious Domain Blocking and Reporting, for private hospitals in the U.S. CIS is fully funding this service for all private hospitals in the U.S. as part of its nonprofit mission to make the connected world a safer place. MDBR can help protect hospital IT systems against ransomware attacks by stopping them before they occur.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday unveiled a plan to better arm public facilities and private companies against cybercriminals following ransomware attacks at two hospitals this month and an upsurge of similar cyber assaults in France. The attacks at the hospitals in Dax and Villefranche-sur-Saone prompted the transfer of some patients to other facilities as the French health care system is under pressure from the coronavirus pandemic.