Finger Lakes Health a multi-institutional health system has made it official that it paid a ransom to avoid cyberattack repercussions. Lara Turbide, the vice president of the healthcare community admitted this news and appreciated the entire community, patients, residents, family members and employees for being patient during the crisis.
As per the sources reporting to our Cybersecurity Insiders, few of the critical servers operating at the Finger Lakes Health were attacked with ransomware on late last Saturday (March 17). Sources add that the data was encrypted and an unknown entity demanded a payment in Bitcoins to gain access to the systems.
And as soon as the staff of the health services provider learned about the cyber attack, they choose to shut down all electronic systems within an hour of Finger Lakes being notified of the attack. The staff soon tried to work out on a plan to recover data. But as the health services provide lacked a business continuity plan in place, they chose to bow down to the demands of the hackers and paid them the said ransom, which according to our scribes was 4BTC.
The agency remains on paper downtime procedures for now but said that the services will bring back to life by Tuesday this week.
Finger Lakes Community Health includes Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hospital in Penn Yan, Geneva General Hospital and several long-term care facilities. The healthcare service provider is known to provide services of private practitioners, off-site surgery, and urgent care
More details about the ransomware attack on Finger lake Health can be viewed by the public on the Finger Lakes Portal and on Finger Lakes Facebook page too.
Note- Readers of Cybersecurity Insiders have to notify a fact over here that United States FBI and other law enforcement agencies have been warning public and private entities against paying a ransom when their servers or databases are impacted by a ransomware attack. Despite such warnings, some health care services providers don’t seem to have learned a lesson.
