A major hospital in Louisiana has to deal with a massive data breach.
And the number of affected Lake Charles Memorial patients is impressive. Several hundred thousand people are now at risk.
A lot of important information stolen
It was on October 21 that the Lake Charles Memorial Health System (Lake Charles Memorial Health System), the largest medical complex in the city of Lake Charles, Louisiana, has detected suspicious activity on its network. On October 25, an internal investigation concluded that a lot of personal patient information had been stolen.
Among the data in question are the names of the patients, the physical address, the date of birth, the medical file, the identification number, the health insurance information and even indications of the care provided. What seems, at the moment, to be most worrying for these people is that their payment information and, for some, their social security number have also leaked.
In total, nearly 270,000 people who received treatment at Lake Charles Memorial were affected by this data theft.
The identity of the hackers is known
Since December 23, the hospital group has been sending warning emails to patients potentially affected by this attack. He said that medical devices were out of reach of hackers.
And the identity of the criminals seems at least already known. It would be the Hive ransomware group that would be at work. The gang of cybercriminals, in fact, on November 15 added the Lake Charles Memorial Health System to the list of entities whose data is revealed, which is generally a sign of an unpaid ransom.
Hive ransomware is well known to law enforcement agencies in major countries. He would have, according to the FBI, already extorted for more than 100 million dollars in various ransoms paid by approximately 1,300 victims since his appearance in June 2021. And he would be used to these operations against health establishments with, as of August 2021, an attack on the Illinois-based Memorial Health System.
Source : Bleeping Computer, Techcrunch
0