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Maryland Hospital Suffers Ransomware Attack

Maryland’s Atlantic General Hospital is experiencing disruptions to some services following a ransomware attack. Healthcare professionals are operating on EHR downtime procedures. Most patients can still be seen; the attack has caused outages affecting the hospital’s pharmacy, outpatient imaging, outpatient walk-in lab, and pulmonary function testing

Note

  • The Healthcare Sector was frequently targeted for ransomware attacks in 2022 and that trend is continuing into 2023. Organizations that make up this critical infrastructure sector can’t say they haven’t been warned that a ransomware attack is coming for you. I urge all organizations to use the recently published ‘Blueprint for Ransomware Defense’ as an action plan for ransomware mitigation, response, and recovery to protect against future attacks.
  • As the event is still under active investigation, Atlantic General is holding their cards close until they have definitive answers. In the meantime, they are operating under a combination of manual procedures and reduced capacity to minimize the overall impact on patients. While working to increase security, which the medical profession is doing, it’s important to look beyond your top identified mitigations to make sure that you’ve not left unaddressed attack paths, e.g, MFA on the workstations, but leave accessible (unprotected) network jacks in the conference rooms.
  • Hospitals really need to isolate patient-facing applications from those, like e-mail and browsing, that are connected to the public networks.

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Alex Lim is a certified IT Technical Support Architect with over 15 years of experience in designing, implementing, and troubleshooting complex IT systems and networks. He has worked for leading IT companies, such as Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco, providing technical support and solutions to clients across various industries and sectors. Alex has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the National University of Singapore and a master’s degree in information security from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the author of several best-selling books on IT technical support, such as The IT Technical Support Handbook and Troubleshooting IT Systems and Networks. Alex lives in Bandar, Johore, Malaysia with his wife and two chilrdren. You can reach him at [email protected] or follow him on Website | Twitter | Facebook

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