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Jenna Barnes and Andrew Smith
CHICAGO — Lurie Children’s Hospital is now a week into a major network outage.
They’ve called it a cyber security issue but aren’t saying much more.
The hospital pulled its networks offline in response to the issue and sent many families scrambling.
Though the hospital hasn’t said exactly what’s to blame, experts WGN-TV has spoken to said it appears to be a ransomware attack and hospitals are increasingly the target.
Robin Berthier, the CEO of Network Perception, said he hopes companies protect themselves against cyber attacks and said ransomware attacks in particular are more widespread than we even know.
“In the last five years, we’ve seen an exponential growth in the number of ransomware attacks and now what’s new is that we’re seeing ransomware attacks against critical infrastructure,” Berthier said. “We see more and more hospitals getting attacked and ransomed for financial gain.”
Critical infrastructure is becoming a more desired target for hackers because the data is so valuable. Hospitals would be under a huge amount of pressure to pay the ransom to get patient data and confidential medical records back. But Berthier said payment is starting to trend in a new direction.
“We’ve seen the amount of ransoms paid skyrocketing in 2021 and 2022 and now going down in 2023 because the government has pushed playbooks to help organizations respond to those types of attacks and the recommendation from authorities is to actually not pay the ransom,” Berthier said.
This is because there is no guarantee a company will actually get its data back and it encourages a hacker to do it again.
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