A cyber-attack on an Ohio-based health system may have exposed the protected health information (PHI) of 216,478 patients.

Memorial Health System was hit with ransomware in the early hours of August 15 2021. The incident forced the health system to suspend user access to all information technology applications related to its operations.

The disruption caused surgical cases and radiology exams to be canceled and placed Memorial Health System emergency departments on diversion.

Speaking at the time of the incident, Memorial Health System president and CEO Scott Cantley said: “Staff at our hospitals – Marietta Memorial, Selby and Sistersville General Hospital – are working with paper charts while systems are restored, and data recovered.”

A press statement, released three days after news of the ransomware attack broke, gave the impression that Memorial Health System had opted to pay its attackers.

“We have reached a negotiated solution and are beginning the process that will restore operations as quickly and as safely as possible,” said Cantley in the August 18 statement.

He added: “We are following a deliberate, systematic approach to bring systems back online securely and in a manner that prioritizes our ability to provide patient care.”

An investigation into the security incident determined that attackers had broken into the health system’s network on July 10 2021, then waited a month to deploy ransomware.

In September last year, Memorial Health System discovered that the patients’ data might have been accessed and exfiltrated in the incident. A review of what files the threat actors could have accessed was carried out. 

By December 9 2021, it had become clear that patients’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, medical/treatment information and health insurance information may have been viewed and stolen.

Memorial Health System began notifying impacted patients via letter on January 12 2022. Individuals affected by the data breach have been offered a complimentary 12-month membership to Kroll’s credit monitoring service. 

Jennifer Offenberger, associate vice president of service excellence at Memorial Health System, said: “While the extensive investigation with the FBI and cybersecurity teams indicates no reason to suspect there has been any fraudulent use or public release of patient information associated with this incident, we are notifying patients whose information may have been accessible during the breach.”

(ISC)² has announced the appointment of Jon France, CISSP, as its first chief information security officer (CISO).

The non-profit association of certified cybersecurity professionals said France will lead all of its cybersecurity operations. This includes providing regular risk assessments and strategic insights to (ISC)²’s senior management and the board of directors and ensuring security is ingrained in all aspects of the organization’s strategy.

In addition, he will advocate best security practices for members around the world, publicly representing the body in this respect. He will report directly to (ISC)² CEO Clar Rosso.

France’s new role follows more than 25 years of experience building and leading diverse technology and security teams. His primary focus has been on raising the resilience of the broader technology ecosystem and the information that flows through, protecting organizations and consumers.

Before his new post, France was head of industry security for GSMA, a global organization representing the mobile ecosystem. Here, he led GSMA’s fraud and security function and served on the company’s leadership team. He previously served as deputy IT director and business continuity manager LexisNexis.

Commenting on the appointment, Clar Rosso, CEO of (ISC)², said: “The role of CISO at (ISC)² is a unique one, and Jon provides us with the experience and passion to lead our security operations and serve as an advocate for our members around the world.

“Jon has a strong track record of managing multi-disciplinary international teams and delivering results, and he will help (ISC)² to continue our rapid growth and global expansion while ensuring security is always a primary consideration.”

Two-fifths (39%) of ransomware victims paid their extorters over the past three years, with the majority of these spending at least $100,000, according to new Anomali research.

The security vendor hired The Harris Poll to complete its Cyber Resiliency Survey – interviewing 800 security decision-makers in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, the UAE, Mexico and Brazil.

Some 87% said their organization had been the victim of a successful attack resulting in damage, disruption, or a breach since 2019. However, 83% said they’d experienced more attacks since the start of the pandemic.

Over half (52%) were ransomware victims, with 39% paying up. Of these, 58% gave their attackers between $100,000 and $1m, while 7% handed over more than $1m.

This will have helped increase the total figure for cybercrime losses over the period. In 2019, just 15% of responding organizations reported losses of $500,000 or more, but this figure almost doubled to 28% by the following year. Figures for 2021 weren’t available.

Part of the challenge appears to be the inability of organizations to quickly detect and respond to any suspicious activity on their networks. Less than half (46%) said they strongly agree current solutions can evolve to detect new globally identified threats.

This is born out in response times: organizations take several days to detect known attacks from adversaries, including cybercrime organizations (3.6 days), individual hackers (3.5 days), APTs (3.3 days) and nation-states (2.9 days), the research claimed.

“We’ve known that cyberattacks have been increasing over the course of the pandemic, but we didn’t know to what degree global enterprises as a whole were being impacted,” said Anomali president Hugh Njemanze.

“This research reveals that adversaries have not only stepped up the number of attacks they have started launching since COVID-19 first struck the world, but have also greatly improved their success rates.”

It will remain frustrating for industry watchers that many organizations are still paying their extorters.

Research has revealed that even those who do so find their stolen data is leaked or monetized by their attackers in any case. A separate study claimed that paying might actually double the cost of recovery.

The latest COVID-19 variant has led to a 521% increase in phishing attacks using the virus as a lure to trick users into clicking, according to Barracuda Networks.

Cyber-criminals often use newsworthy events in their social engineering attacks, and COVID-19 provided a bumper opportunity when it emerged in 2020.

The security vendor observed a 667% month-on-month surge in COVID-19 phishing emails from February to March that year. It recorded another significant increase when new vaccines were released at the start of 2021.

Now public concern over the highly transmissible Omicron variant is catching the eye of phishers.

Among the tactics used to trick users into clicking on malicious links and/or entering personal details are offers of counterfeit or unauthorized COVID-19 tests and protective equipment such as masks or gloves.

Some impersonate testing labs and providers, or even employees sharing their results, said Barracuda.

In other phishing emails, the user may receive a fake notification for an unpaid order of tests and is urged to provide their PayPal details to complete delivery of the kit, the vendor claimed.

Barracuda Networks CTO, Fleming Shi, said the answer lies in improving employee phishing awareness training and plugging in advanced email security.

“Capitalizing on the chaos of the pandemic is not a new trend in the world of cybercrime. Yet with constantly evolving tactics, and new trends to latch on to, it’s easy to see why scammers are not giving up on this trick,” he added.

“Just like the threat of COVID-19, pandemic-themed scams are not going to disappear overnight, but fortunately, there are a number of tactics that businesses and consumers can employ to ensure they remain protected.”

In related news, a Comparitech study this week claimed that unscrupulous healthcare workers are enabling a massive black market in COVID-19 digital vaccination certificates and passes.

The researchers found dark web adverts looking for any such workers who empathize with the anti-vaxxers buying these passes.

“When someone buys a fraudulent certificate, they must first sign up for their country’s respective COVID vaccination database. They send their name, PIN number and other necessary info to the vendor,” Comparitech explained.

“A doctor or other healthcare worker marks that person’s record with confirmed vaccination. The buyer’s QR code then becomes valid. It takes just a few hours for the process to complete once a purchase is made.”

Merck has won a long-running legal battle to force its insurer to cover the costs of damages caused by the NotPetya ‘ransomware’ attacks.

The pharma giant was one of many big-name multinationals hit by the destructive malware, disguised as ransomware by Russian attackers targeting Ukrainian organizations back in 2017, as they are again today.

However, the malware soon spread globally, causing potentially billions of dollars of damage.

Many companies, including Merck and confectionary giant Mondelez, found their insurer refusing to pay because of an exclusion in their policy for “acts of war.”

However, a New Jersey superior court judge has now ruled that the language therein implies armed conflict rather than the cyber kind.

Although Merck was claiming under an “all-risk” property insurance policy, both these and more specific cyber policies often contain such exclusions.

However, the ruling may not be beneficial to other policyholders in the long run, as insurers are in general becoming much more prescriptive about coverage for cyber-incidents.

Lloyds of London last November released a new set of clauses that broadened act of war exclusions to “cyber-operations between states which are not excluded by the definition of war, cyber-war or cyber-operations which have a major detrimental impact on a state.”

Peter Groucutt, co-founder of Databarracks, said the new clauses would favor insurers going forward.

“Attribution is another challenge because it is not always clear who was responsible for an attack. There is understandably a lot of deception in cyber-warfare, with attackers leaving misleading breadcrumbs pointing to different attackers or nations. These clauses allow the insurer to determine attribution if the government does not or ‘takes an unreasonable length of time to.’ That seems to be a dangerous case of checking one’s own homework,” he argued.

“There is another challenge of attribution in that cyber groups are often loosely affiliated with a government. It is not always clear if they are directly controlled by or sponsored by the government. Previously, that distinction would be more important. Again, these new clauses widen the net with ‘those acting on its behalf’ working as a catch-all for these kinds of relationships.”

Ultimately the “parameters for payout” are narrowing, shifting more emphasis onto organizations to improve baseline protections, Groucutt concluded.