A Ransomware attack which took place in the department of Metropolitan Urology Department of Milwaukee, Wisconsin is said to have exposed patient data of more than 18000 users. As per our sources, the attack exposed the data related to patients who visited between 2003 and 2010.
As per the details available to the media, the servers at US Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights were hit by the virus on November 28th,2016 and the authorities of the Milwaukee discovered it on January 10th, 2017.
From then on, the Metropolitan Urology department has been working with an IT firm to remove the ransomware and has started taking all the steps to prevent future attacks. First, it blocked all the traffic from the affected servers and then improved its firewall, email security, and protection on all employee devices.
As the government department had a backup and business continuity solution in place, it wasn’t much affected by this cyber disasters.
Metropolitan Urology Department of Milwaukee has also conducted a risk analysis on its IT system to determine any future vulnerabilities. The IT department of the government organization is hopeful that their current security policies which are in place can combat with any such future cyber disasters.
But now their concern is that the data could have been exposed to dark web and could be used for any fraudulent activities in future.
Note- In the year 2014, a cyber attack launched on LinkedIn accounts exposed data of more than million users. The details revealed in the attack were used by the hackers to launch more such cyber attacks on some high profile LinkedIn users such as Google Pichai, Facebook’s Marck Zuckerberg and such.
Now, imagine what will happen if the hackers gain control of critical info such as phone numbers, addresses, email addresses and social security numbers….?
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