jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

A local hospital network experienced a cyberattack. A friend went there yesterday, and they told her that her recent test records were gone as the result of a cyberattack. Today's newspaper has a big article about it. All three local facilities went off-line while investigating. I've heard of hospitals having to pay a ransom to get access to their systems, but I don't think that's the case here. Maybe this was just a test-of-concept.
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It seems to me that the most important concern in the country should be cybersecurity. All sorts of companies have experienced cyberattacks. If a foreign country can control our industries and defenses, it doesn't get much worse than that. Anything that is connected to the Internet is vulnerable.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Meanwhile, people continue to open bogus emails and click on links therein...........


"You've won a "gee-whiz-bang widget".......

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Right. And inserting flash drives they happened to find lying around.

Toment Loc: FL, IL

dhspeck

My take on that is that not everything needs to be connected to the Internet all the time.

alawry Loc: Timaru New Zealand

Jerry we had the same thing here in NZ a few years ago, they took out several hospitals and all the doctor practices in the area, nobody had appointments or records available. When I worked in the computer industry, pre 1986 I worked for a man who later became IT consultant for this particiular area, and then retired a few months I think before the "attack"I had an interesting discussion with him He had designed a whole duplicate system with layers of protection etc, but it was deemed too expensive. His replacement person threw the whole idea out claiming all they neede was Microsoft Defender. They were months and months getting things working reliably and the costs (that could be calculated) far exceeded the duplicate redundant system proposed. No one had forseen the ripple on effect a simple outage resulted in.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

That's on a brass plaque in every CEOs office. "Too expensive" has killed thousands of innocent people.

Harry02 Loc: Gardena, CA

I worked IT.
We had the basic Grandfather/Father/Son routine, and daily incrementals.
Plus last month's full backup was offsite. and we tested the backups to make sure they worked.
Yeah it took time. But we had clients paying the bills that deserved protection.
We could go back to a"clean" backup and be up in a day.
OH NO MR BILL!
Head count reduction. Total quality management. Matrix management. overtime verboten.
Just like today-top third went away, another fifth "redundant", saving money for bonuses.
Occasional backups, put on a shelf. I was replaced with 3 contractors.
Their company then hired me for another job, with a nice bump.
Yup it happened. Ole wornout backup didn't work. Took the Corps 2 weeks just to get running,
They never did get everything back up.
Tho they did hire a 3rd party Corps to handle the backups, and data security.

JBuckley

The cyber attacks are coming from all over the world.
(American computers) are most vulnerable, as manufacturing, medical, police,
fire departments, and just about every company puts 90% or more of their
reliance on these machines.

The FCC needs to take a more active role in catching and prosecution of the
culprits. International laws are too lax. Most get a fine, and a tap on the wrist.
The FCC needs to make them pay the (companies) that are hit, with Billion $$
fines, and 30 years in Prison.....no parole allowed. (with no bargaining with the D.A.

When a hospital loses a patient because of a [cyber attack,] the retribution, for
the crime, should be that of a murder suspect, in the second degree.

Whenever, a military function or base is hit, it should be considered an attack
on the "U.S. Government"! No more "Mr. Nice Guy".

The Chinese government takes them out and bury them in an unmarked grave.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

The wheels of "progress" move extremely slowly.

The hospitals are back in business, and they're trying to determine if any patient info has been compromised. Of course it has!