A recent study made in the time frame of January to June this year revealed that over 1.2 million ransomware attacks were launched so far in this year. And as per an estimate, most of the targets were businesses operating in healthcare, finance, education, utilities and technology sectors.
The research carried out by Barracuda networks confirmed that most cyber attacks of ransomware genre do not make it to the news headlines as the CFOs,CTOs and CIOs hide the news because of the fear of losing a job.
The other news trending on Google and related to ransomware is about the steal of over 1 million patient records stolen and released to the dark web as the victim failed to pay a ransom on time. The victimized healthcare firm is OakBend Medical Centre that was hit by Daixin Team that claims to have stolen sensitive details such as social security numbers, patient treatment info, names and date of births.
OakBend has contacted Microsoft and FBI for help in dealing with the situation and its preliminary inquires revealed that the criminals might have gained access to 1 million digital records and not one million patient records as claimed earlier.
Argentina’s capital city, Buenos Aires, has announced that a ransomware attack has compromised its internal servers, disrupting its Wi-Fi services on the whole. The gang that induced the malware is yet to be detected, but information is out that the file encrypting malware spreading group targeted the servers on Sunday and since then the network has been down.
Fifth is the news related to a judicial form named Warner Norcross &Judd (WNJ) that reported a ransomware incident yesterday. WNJ suspects that the attack could be the work of a state funded actor and is currently busy collecting the evidence to bolster its claims.
Surprisingly, the incident affected about 120,000 Primary Health Members exposing their social security numbers, debit card numbers, credit card numbers, DOBs, names, driving license numbers, contact details, patient account numbers, life insurance details, and health details.
Finally, it’s the news related to Practice Resources LLC, that faced a ransomware attack a few weeks ago and is now in news for facing a new class action lawsuit as it failed to protect the information of its customers from hackers.
In April this year, the company suffered a sophisticated attack that led to the breach of data related to 1 million Central New York populace.
As the said healthcare services provider is assigned that task to look after the IT needs of over 28 different hospitals and clinics, the data leak of medical records is indeed a cause of severe concern.
