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Expert Comment: Michigan hospitals struggle due to cyber attack
August 2024 by Dr Darren Williams, CEO and Founder at Blackfog
News has emerged that a Michigan hospital network, McLaren Health Care, has suffered from outages affecting systems and computers, due to a cyber attack that began earlier this week. The outages have caused some surgeries and procedures to be cancelled and rescheduled, although emergency departments continue to operate.
Notably, although they are not attributing this to a ransomware attack, a printed ransom note from INC, allegedly sent to the hospital, was shared on X. Darren Williams, CEO and Founder of BlackFog explain:
“As Michigan’s hospital network suffers from another attack, it’s a further reminder that the Health sector continues to be a prime target for attackers.
Sadly, there can be a human cost as well as a financial cost when health systems are affected. In the case of this incident, the attackers have caused disruption to patient care as non-emergency appointments and procedures have had to be rescheduled.
Attacks on the sector aren’t likely to slow down: in April through to June, Healthcare was the most targeted sector by ransomware attackers. Health providers remain a particularly lucrative target for attackers also intent on stealing sensitive data that, in the wrong hands, could be sold on the dark web, leaked on social media or worse still, used for double extortion or even triple extortion.
Providers should not only have plans in place to ‘stress test’ their systems so that any incident has minimal impact to patient care but also make sure there are robust protections around their sensitive data. Data theft is the main incentive for ransomware, fortunately it is now possible to stop exfiltration attempts in real-time, effectively stopping attackers in their tracks. If they can’t exfiltrate the data, they are forced to move on to the next target.”
