Allergy Partners, that offers high end healthcare services to patients infected with asthma and allergic diseases, has fallen prey to ransomware attack that is being investigated by FBI.
Highly placed sources say that the cyber incident took place on February 23rd,2021 and the hackers are demanding $1.75 million as ransom to free up the database from the file encrypting malware.
Patients requiring allergy shots at Asheville and Arden offices were asked to come next week as the digital data related to the medicines and treatment was inaccessible to the staff members.
“As soon as the data is up and accessible, all the appointments will be rescheduled”, says a spokesperson from the Allergy Partners.
Healthcare service providers are becoming soft targets for hackers as their data sells at a very high price point on dark web. So, an increase in cyber incidents on hospitals, clinics, and healthcare units seems to have surged by 61% in the past 14 months since 2020 said Margret Solomon, a research scientist at Kaspersky.
In another news related to ransomware, data related to 100,000 patients remained inaccessible as the data was encrypted by hackers on January 13,2021. Information is out that data related to patients and billing software of Arizona based Cochise Eye and Laser firm was locked up in the attack.
And the highlight of the incident is that the threat actors deleted a portion of data that might include date of births, names, contact info, social security numbers and some medical history details. Information on whether the deleted data was transferred to foreign servers is yet to be confirmed.
As the scheduling system data was impacted deeply, most of the appointments taken after Jan 1st this year had to be rescheduled to some other day as the old data was unavailable for access despite implementing a disaster recovery plan.
IT Staff of Cochise Eye and Laser have started a data recovery process and have assured that they will implement additional Cybersecurity measures in near future to avoid such troubles.
Third, students at the Central Piedmont Community College(CPCC) are facing a tough time to go ahead with their yearly syllabus as most of the online course data was corrupted in a ransomware attack that took place in February 10,2021 that led to the disruption of phones, emails, and learning material.
“The attack did corrupt a lot of online course information and we are trying our best to restore the systems,” said Jeff Lawrence, VP of Communications, Marketing and Public Relations, CPCC.
