Tag Archive for: fallout

This week in the Change Healthcare attack fallout: 10 standout quotes


Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.

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Ransomware attack fallout continues at several CT hospitals


Some services remain down at Eastern Connecticut Health Network and Waterbury Health on Tuesday, days after the hospital systems’ parent company reported being hit by a ransomware attack.

Eastern Connecticut Health Network, or ECHN, operates Manchester Memorial Hospital and Rockville General Hospital in Vernon. Waterbury Health operates Waterbury Hospital. Both are owned by Prospect Medical Holdings, a California-based company that also owns hospitals there as well as in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. 

The company said Tuesday there were no updates and did not answer questions regarding when services and locations that have closed will be back up and running or if confidential information was exposed in the attack.

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ECHN’s website as of Tuesday still displayed a banner stating it “along with all Prospect Medical facilities, is experiencing a systemwide outage.”

“We are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible and regret any inconvenience,” the banner stated. It included a link to a page listing which services and locations were closed. 

As of Tuesday, the page said Evergreen and Tolland Imaging, outpatient blood drawing, urgent care and its Women’s Center are closed, along with outpatient medical imaging on weekdays. 

Waterbury Health’s Facebook page also listed several locations or services that were shut down due to the “data security incident.’ 

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“We are following downtime procedures including the use of paper records. The outage has affected some of our outpatient services, mostly diagnostic imaging and blood draw and some patient appointments,” the organization said in a post on Tuesday. “We have contacted and will continue to contact any affected patients.”

The post said Waterbury Health’s blood draw locations are closed, except for an outpatient blood drawing location at Waterbury Hospital.

Women’s Imaging and Open MRI in Southbury are both closed, as is Diagnostic Radiology Associates, which has locations in Waterbury, Middlebury and Southbury.

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The phrase refers to a type of cyber security breach where adversaries plant malware or break…

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The Tragic Fallout From a School District’s Ransomware Breach


Ransomware gangs have long sought pain points where their extortion demands have the greatest leverage. Now an investigation from NBC News has made clear what that merciless business model looks like when it targets kids: One ransomware group’s giant leak of sensitive files from the Minneapolis school system exposes thousands of children at their most vulnerable, complete with behavioral and psychological reports on individual students and highly sensitive documentation of cases where they’ve allegedly been abused by teachers and staff.

We’ll get to that. But first, WIRED contributor Kim Zetter broke the news this week that the Russian hackers who carried out the notorious SolarWinds espionage operation were detected in the US Department of Justice’s network six months earlier than previously reported—but the DOJ didn’t realize the full scale of the hacking campaign that would later be revealed. 

Meanwhile, WIRED reporter Lily Hay Newman was at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco, where she brought us stories of how security researchers disrupted the operators of the Gootloader malware who sold access to victims’ networks to ransomware groups and other cybercriminals, and how Google Cloud partnered with Intel to hunt for and fix serious security vulnerabilities that underlie critical cloud servers. She also captured a warning in a talk from NSA cybersecurity director Rob Joyce, who told the cybersecurity industry to “buckle up” and prepare for big changes to come from AI tools like ChatGPT, which will no doubt be wielded by both attackers and defenders alike.

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On that same looming AI issue, we looked at how the deepfakes enabled by tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, DALL-E, and StableDiffusion will have far-reaching political consequences. We examined a newly introduced US bill that would ban kids under the age of 13 from joining social media. We tried out the new feature in Google’s Authenticator App that allows you to back up your two-factor codes to a Google account in case you lose your 2FA device. And we opined—well, ranted—on the ever-growing sprawl of silly names that the cybersecurity industry gives to hacker groups.

But that’s not all. Each…

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Fallout From Hack of City Law Department Could Linger for Months


Among the thousands of lawsuits New York City faces each year, this case was unexceptional — a man suing the city and several police officers over his arrest during a 2016 demonstration. But last week, the case hit a snag for an unusual reason: The city’s Law Department had been hacked, and lawyers were struggling to gain access to important documents.

“Practically all attorneys from the New York City Law Department still do not have remote access to electronic files,” wrote Jorge M. Marquez, a city attorney, to the judge on July 1, asking for an extension of deadlines in the false-arrest case.

Mr. Marquez noted that attorneys could enter the Law Department’s offices to review files but because of the pandemic, many attorneys, including himself, were not going into work. “It is currently unknown when this problem will be resolved,” he wrote, adding that the city hoped it would be in the coming weeks.

More than a month after hackers gained access to the Law Department’s computer system — which stores an untold amount of sensitive information — it is now apparent that the breach had a more profound effect than officials have publicly revealed. The department’s chief IT officer has been reassigned and replaced. And the fallout, as chronicled in internal communications obtained by The New York Times, may for months continue to affect the 1,000-lawyer agency that defends the city in court.

Many city Law Department employees have returned to the office on a limited basis, but the inability to retrieve documents remotely has slowed some of their work.

Laura Feyer, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, said in a statement that the Law Department’s attorneys are “arranging on-site and remote work accordingly to ensure there is minimal impact to cases.”

Nick Paolucci, a Law Department spokesman, said that a majority of the department’s attorneys have been able to meet court deadlines and that the legal work of the city was moving forward.

But court records show the hack continues to complicate cases. In letter after letter to judges, the city’s attorneys have sought postponements in cases, saying that without access to electronic files, they could not prepare a…

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