The Week in Cybersecurity: French hospital hit with ransomware attack

French hospital hit with cyberattack — what this means for securing critical infrastructure

Hospitals and other healthcare providers are essential to national security and public health. Unfortunately, cybercriminals have turned their attention to medical facilities as worthy targets, seeing high monetary value in the selling of hospital and patient data. According to PEW, in 2020 and 2021, there were at least 168 ransomware attacks affecting 1,763 clinics, hospitals and healthcare organizations in the U.S. alone. This week, a new instance has emerged outside of the U.S., causing global concern for securing this critical infrastructure sector.

Security Week reports that the Center Hospitalier Sud Francilien (CHSF), a hospital outside of Paris, France, has been hit with a cyberattack. The attack happened at 1:00am local time on August 21st, 2022, and it impacted CHSF’s entire network, including computers, storage servers (such as medical imaging devices), and patient admission systems. CHSF has 1,000 beds and 3,500 employees, but as a result of this attack, the hospital has been forced to divert patients seeking care that requires the systems impacted to neighboring medical centers.

While CHSF hasn’t released details about the attack, sources told AFP that this was most likely a ransomware attack, and that the criminals have demanded a ransom of $10 Million. Some suspect that the LockBit ransomware group was to blame for the attack, since it is a successful ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS). Meanwhile, the gang has not publicly claimed responsibility for it. Others are skeptical to blame LockBit, because of the group’s known policy not to attack hospitals and other medical centers.

This attack on CHSF once again demonstrates that the cyber threat to medical facilities is an unfortunate reality, and that cybercriminals clearly see them as a viable target. Medical facilities such as hospitals must be prioritized when working to secure all critical infrastructure entities. A large-scale attack of this kind is a possible threat, and an attack of this magnitude can easily hurt the maintenance of national security and public health.

News Roundup

Here are the stories we’re paying attention to this week…

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