Feb 19 -While it was not the first hacked organization to acquiesce to attackers’ demands, the California hospital that paid $17,000 in ransom to hackers to regain control of its computer system was unusual in one notable way: It went public with the news.
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Stefanek’s description matches the impact of a ransomware infection, in which malware encrypts data and then displays a ransom demand, directing victims to pay for the decryption key. Ultimately, CEO Allen Stefanek stated that “the quickest and most effective way to restore our systems and administrative functions was to pay the ransom and obtain the decryption key”.
The president of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center said the facility paid the bounty “in the best interest of restoring normal operations”. The amount of ransom requested was 40 Bitcoins, equivalent to approximately $17,000.
“The malware locked access to certain computer systems and prevented us from sharing communications electronically”, said the statement.
“Although a few families-including CryptoWall 3, CTB-Locker, and CryptoLocker-dominate the current ransomware landscape, we predict that new variants of these families and new families will surface with new stealth functionalities”, McAfee Labs said in its latest 2016 Threats Predictions report.
Hollywood Presbyterian paid forty bitcoins, a digital foreign money of floating worth that on Thursday was value about $ 420 every.
During 2013, the number of attacks each month rose from 100,000 in January to 600,000 in December, according to a 2014 report by Symantec, the maker of antivirus software. IBM said that previous year more than half of all customer calls reporting cyber attacks involved ransomware.
Many ransomware victims pay quietly, or abandon infected machines. It’s not clear how many of those users were individuals and how many companies. On Monday, 10 days after the attack, the network was in full operation again, he said.
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A spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not immediately comment on whether it had advised Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center or any other company to pay in ransomware cases, but experts working for internet security firms say that it is a common occurrence and that often the most efficient solution is to simply pay out, according to the Associated Press. It was uncommon that Hollywood Presbyterian, which has greater than four hundred beds and is owned by CHA Medical Center of South Korea, each revealed the attack publicly and disclosed its value.
