New Jersey Hospital Discloses Cyber Incident

CentraState Medical Center in New Jersey is operating under electronic health record (EHR) downtime following a cybersecurity incident that began last month. The medical center is also sending patients to other hospitals in the area due to the IT disruptions.

Note

• Despite LockBit’s actions, hospitals and medical remain top targets for attackers. Even so, don’t assume those not in that sector aren’t also targets, assume you are and plan accordingly. There are a lot of lessons learned from the medical sector on how they are minimizing impact to their customers as well as leveraging partners in a crisis. Consider hosting their CISO or Incident Responders to tell their story to your staff, board or even cyber association meetings.
• Whether this turns out to be a ransomware attack or as described, IT security failure, it underlines the importance of response and recovery functions. These functions should be regularly exercised, to include public communication by the executive leadership team.
• Healthcare, more specifically hospitals, continue to be a favorite target of extortion attacks. Not only is patient care impacted but valuable clinical information will never be digitized. Consider proactively disconnecting from public networks unless and until patient care systems can be isolated from those that face the public networks. Patient care applications and systems that use the public networks must be encrypted end-to-end at the application layer.