Cybercriminals never stop attacking .Healthcare organizations are a favorite target. According to reports, just days before Christmas, a San Antonio mental health provider and a hospital in Mexico revealed that they were attacked by hackers.
The Center for Health Care Services (CHSC) in San Antonio experienced an outage of systems across all of its clinics due to a cyberattack that took place last week.
Roosevelt General Hospital (RGH) , the second organization to be affected, revealed that malware was found on one of its digital imaging servers containing patient information . The incident occurred in mid-November.
The Center for Health Care Services: Systems out of order
CHSC provides services to adults and children with "mental disorders, intellectual or developmental problems" as well as to substance users.
The agency's CEO, Jelynne LeBlanc Burley, said both the FBI and the Secret Service are investigating the incident, which led to the computers being disabled. The attack appears to have been part of a series of attacks on healthcare organizations.
When authorities notified the organization of the attack, CHSC's IT team acted quickly and limited the infection to a single system.
“We are now in the process of restoring our system,” Burley said. “We have started with our largest clinics and are working slowly and carefully to provide security to the rest of systems .”
Regarding the RGH hospital, it was revealed on December 23 that some servers were affected by malware on November 14.
According to the hospital's announcement, 500 records, including "names, addresses, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, social security numbers, phone numbers, insurance information, medical information and gender."
“Although there has been no confirmed data breach, RGH is alerting potential patients and offering assistance in monitoring their information,” the warning adds.
Immediately after detecting the malware, security were able to restore the affected server. They were also able to recover patient information.
The investigation is ongoing but there is no information about any patient information being compromised. “This breach did not impact our electronic records system or billing system,” said Kaye Green, CEO.
RGH also recommends that all patients who received notification of the breach proactively check their credit cards and accounts.
Tens of thousands of similar violations took place in December.
Healthcare organizations were at the center of these attacks. A large amount of medical information was exposed online.
According to the Emsisoft report, 759 healthcare providers were affected by ransomware during 2019. The attacks caused a lot of problems for both organizations and patients.
