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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Inside Ireland’s Public Healthcare Ransomware Scare

Summary: A PricewaterhouseCoopers post-mortem of the May 2021 Conti ransomware attack on Ireland's Health Service Executive found that nearly two months passed between the initial infection on March 18, 2021 and the ransomware's detonation on May 14, with the attacker operating in the environment for eight weeks. The report also found the HSE had over 30,000 end-of-life Windows 7 workstations, no CISO or Security Operations Center, and that IT administrators failed to act on multiple warning signs before the attack shut down national and local networks and cut appointments in some areas by up to 80 percent.

What's compelling: Conti initially demanded USD $20 million, and the HSE's director general said recovery costs were likely to exceed USD $600 million; the report notes it is unclear how much data would have been unrecoverable had a decryption key not become available, since backups were only periodically written to offline tape.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Data Breaches
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