Yellow on the hacker attack on a hospital in Germany
Delayed treatment of a patient, who later died, because the emergency room of the university hospital of Dusseldorf closed following a hacker attack. Police initiate a murder investigation after the attack on the German hospital
In Germany, a hacker attack in a hospital could have resulted in the death of a woman. The patient could not be hospitalized and was sent to another facility upon arrival at the emergency room.
Those responsible for the cyber attack disabled the computer systems at the Düsseldorf University Hospital. The target may not have been the hospital, but the German university.
Yesterday, the German police launched an investigation into manslaughter. The patient died while doctors tried to transfer her to another hospital.
All the details.
THE HACKER ATTACK ON THE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL IN DUSSELDORF
The attack hit the hospital on the night of 9 September, scrambling data and rendering IT systems unusable.
According to the RTL network site, it was of the 'ransomware' type, in which the data is encrypted by a virus and the authors demand a ransom to deliver the key to decrypt it.
The incident, the health authorities explained, took place at the University of Dusseldorf clinic, and hackers exploited a known vulnerability in a VPN (virtual private network) software developed by Citrix.
As a result, thirty hospital servers were encrypted last week, and as a result several hospital systems went down, with the facility shutting down accesses to the emergency room and postponing surgery.
REDEMPTION ASKED
A note left on one of the servers asked for the ransom, of about 900 thousand euros payable in bitcoin, to the Heinrich Heine University, affiliated to the hospital, and not to the hospital itself.
The Dusseldorf cleanup then contacted the hackers and explained that they had hit the hospital and not the university. They withdrew the request by providing the key to decrypt the data before losing track of them.
WHAT THE GERMAN NATIONAL AUTHORITY FOR CYBER SECURITY HAS DECLARED
The German national cybersecurity authority says they are on-site at the hospital to help the hospital's IT staff rebuild the systems.
“We warned of the software vulnerability back in January and highlighted the consequences of its exploitation. Those responsible for the attack have access to internal networks and systems and can still paralyze them months later. " Arne Schönbohm, president of the authority, said.
“I can only emphasize that such warnings should not be ignored or postponed, but need immediate action. The accident shows once again how seriously this risk must be taken ”.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CYBERNETIC ATTACK
This time the ransomware attack could have cost a woman her life. The patient, who arrived at the hospital in serious condition, was diverted to Wuppertal, about 30 kilometers away, with an hour delay in treatment.
ACCUSATION OF MANSLAUGHTER
Cologne prosecutors officially launched an investigation into manslaughter yesterday morning. An expert told the BBC that, if confirmed, it would be the first known case of a death caused by a cyber attack.
RANSOMWARE ATTACK ALSO AT TOR VERGATA UNIVERSITY
As we said, those responsible for the attack did not intend to hit the hospital, but the related university Heinrich Heine. This is not the first time that a university has been targeted by a ransomware attack.
In mid-September , the Tor Vergata University of Rome also suffered a ransomware-type hacker attack. Encrypted the data of teachers and students and exfiltrated sensitive information and confidential documents of scientific research such as that to combat Covid-19.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/giallo-sullattacco-hacker-a-un-ospedale-germania/ on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 05:33:15 +0000.