The “Other Costs” of a Cyber Attack

The Spanish public entity Consorci Sanitari Integral (CSI) is a Barcelona-based hospital system that treats more than a million patients a year and has more than 3,000 physicians and staff.

They detected a ransomware attack last Friday.

Here is the remarkable news – they were able to recover in three days. They say this is due to the fact that they had effective backups.

That included restoring more than 3,000 computers with new software and new computers for primary care centers.

But here is the bad news.

They did not pay the ransom. At first glance you would think this is good news.

But the hackers didn’t appreciate that, so they published 52 gigabytes of hospital data on the dark web.

Those 52 gigs include medical and identity records.

So while the hospital did not pay the ransom and was only down for a few days – which is great – now they are dealing with the exposure of 52 gigs of confidential data.

The first part of the story – that they were able to recover amazingly quickly was, they said, because of the backups that they had, but also due the the network segmentation which made it difficult for the hackers to spread their ransomware.

The second part – that they now have to deal with – 50 plus gigabytes of stolen data freely available and the lawsuits that will cause – for that part they were not so successful.

If you would like help keeping the bad folks out or minimizing the damage they can do if they get in, please contact us.

Credit: Data Breach Today

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