Hackers take down hospital website, demand $3.6 Million in ransom

A hospital in Los Angeles, United States, has declared a state of internal emergency after getting attacked by cyber criminals, demanding $3.6 million in ransom.

The Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, a private hospital in L.A, was the victim of a severe malicious attack last week, taking down its whole system. Since the attack, the hospital has been in a state of disarray and has declared an internal emergency as medical professionals and administrators have to resort to age-old methods of communication via telephone and fax. Meanwhile, the hackers are demanding a ransom of 9,000 Bitcoins (roughly $3.6 Million) for restoring the systems.

While it isn’t clear if patient or employee records were compromised or not, the hospital workers aren’t able to access patient records such as lab reports, X-rays and MRI results, dreadfully affecting their efficiency and overall performance. As a result, a lot of patients have had to be transferred to other medical facilities.

What’s astonishing is the amount of money the hackers are asking for, “$3.6 million”! That is a mind-boggling amount of money to ask for in ransom for taking down the systems of any big corporation, let alone a medical facility.

Hacking isn’t uncommon these days but usually, hackers tend to target people or companies that don’t really go down well with the people, like the infamous hacker group Anonymous, and even though there are numerous cases where people do indeed indulge in hacking to earn money, their motto tends to be “Stealing from the rich” rather than impeding the work of healthcare facilities. Not all hackers are bad though, there are also some white hat hackers who work for the good of the internet community.

Source- CSO Image-BeliefNet