Cybercriminals are targeting the weaknesses in hospitals to wreak havoc and rake in profits - Motherboard
Motherboard, March 31, 2016
Cybercriminals are targeting the weaknesses in hospitals to wreak havoc and rake in profits. They have found a new, soft target for mass extortion schemes. Since February, at least a dozen hospitals have been affected by ransomware—malware that encrypts a victim's files until they pay a hefty bounty. The way some medical networks are designed means the ransomware threat facing hospitals may get even worse, and problems aren't likely to be addressed any time soon. Sergey Lozhkin, a senior researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said this is because “in lots of cases medical equipment is not isolated from the local office network.” If somehow ransomware gets inside the hospital, it could spread through the internal network and manage to get onto medical devices. Security of these devices has largely been an afterthought, with efficiency naturally pegged as the highest priority.
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