Update, 1/16/2018: Hancock Regional Hospital ended up paying the ransom demand of $55,000. Officials are still reporting patient data was not breached. Officials did report the 1,400 files that were ecrypted were backed up, and could have been replaced. Although, they believed it would be more cost effective to pay the ransom demands to regain system accessibility and functionality in a faster manner. After receiving the decryption keys, systems were back up and running. However, there are still a few glitches in the system which are projected to be fixed in upcoming weeks.
Indiana Hospital is Latest Ransomware Victim
Hancock Regional Hospital, located in Greenfield, Indiana reported a ransomware attack that infected their systems on January 11th. Although the staff identified an issue immediately, the malware was still able to infect the email systems, internal operating systems and health care records. However, hospital officials have reported no security breaches at this time.
After encrypting the facility’s systems, the cyber criminals demanded a payment in bitcoin. The amount however, is not being disclosed. At this time, the hospital’s systems remain down. Despite the ransomware attack, Hancock Regional Hospital remains open, and employees are using paper records until the systems are functional.
Below is the official statement from Hancock Regional Hospital,
“Hancock Regional Hospital has been the victim of a criminal act by an unknown party that attempted to shut down out operations via our information systems by locking our computer network and demanding payment for a digital key to unlock it. Unfortunately, this sort of behavior is widespread in the world today, and we had the misfortune to be next on the list. We are working closely with an IT incident response company and national law enforcement. At this time, we are deep into the analysis of the situation and see no indication that patient records have been removed from our network. In addition to excellent performance by our IT Department, our clinical teams have performed exceptionally well, and patient care has not been compromised. Our doors are open at Hancock Regional Hospital.”
Other Ransomware Attacks
We have also created a map, see below, of the ransomware attacks that have taken place in the U.S.
