Hacking against healthcare services increases
Specialists in enterprise data protection services investigate a computer attack on the IT network of the medical laboratory test firm LabCorp, which forced the company to temporarily put offline its systems, delaying its testing processes and customer access to lab results.
In a statement the company claimed to have “immediately disrupted certain systems as part of its strategy to contain the attack, which temporarily affected the processing of clinical tests and customer access to them over the weekend. LabCorp already works to restore full system functionality as quickly as possible, test operations resumed substantially, and additional systems and functions are expected to be restored over the next few days”.
According to enterprise data protection services experts in charge of the analysis, some LabCorp’s customer diagnostic may experience brief delays in delivering their lab results while the company completely restores its functions. The company further adds in its statement that “suspicious activity was detected only in LabCorp diagnostic systems. There is no proven evidence that it had affected product research or development systems”.
Persistent Attacks
According enterprise data protection services experts from the International Institute of Cyber Security, the hack in LabCorp is a sign of the rise of information attacks against a large entity of companies in the health sector.
Indeed, attacks on the health sector, from ransomware to database theft, are increasingly being presented. In some ransomware attacks against this sector, hackers first turn to backups and compromise access to these copies to vendors, thus information security specialists started thinking that these attacks put them at increasing risk the stability of the infrastructure of these companies, and therefore that of the patients.
According to FBI reports, healthcare sector has lost about $2.3M in ransomware attacks so far this year.
Working as a cyber security solutions architect, Alisa focuses on application and network security. Before joining us she held a cyber security researcher positions within a variety of cyber security start-ups. She also experience in different industry domains like finance, healthcare and consumer products.
