Hospitals Across U.S. Forced to Divert Patients Due to Possible Cyber Attack… ? For all our cyber experts… when they “store” off-line, is the attack forcing them to purge data/info.. example. Upgrades installed or uninstalled, data scraping occurring? Thoughts?
(www.campussafetymagazine.com)
🗣️ DISCUSSION 💬
I'm reaching the end of an IT career that spans from just before the Internet took off until now, including about a decade in medical.
I could write a book on the sorts of pernicious IT, organizational, political and management issues lead to problems like this.
TBF, the problems aren't tied so much to the medical industry, but because of mandatory reporting (under HIPAA) they get exposed more often than other industries. FBI is probably involved, which in my experience takes a bad situation and makes it worse, with little to no benefit to anyone.
I'd agree with Jackdagger that these are probably extortion events and not necessarily related to medical data. IMHO, hospitals are low hanging fruit for exploitation due to many factors, but I'd be willing to bet that in almost every case, IT staff has known about the problems for years and has been repeatedly trying to get funding and personnel to address them.
I think you'll see more of this as we push out the "50yo white guys" in favor of young, diverse, and woketastic replacements. It's one thing to be competent and not be able to get funding. It's a whole other situation when what little funding provided is squandered by incompetent people in the first place. Tighten your seatbelts for the coming ride.