Cyber Crime

Another French hospital hit by a ransomware attack

A ransomware attack hit the Oloron-Sainte-Marie hospital in southwest France, it is the third such attack in the last month.

A ransomware attack paralyzed the systems at the Oloron-Sainte-Marie hospital in southwest France. The incident took place on Monday, the ransomware gang is demanding the payment of a ransom of $50,000 worth of Bitcoin.

The infection was first discovered by Rémi Rivière, an engineer in charge of all the installations, on March 8 afternoon. In response to the attack, the IT staff took offline part of the hospital network to prevent the spread of the malware.

“We reacted as quickly as possible. This virus is of the Ransomware type, the same one that hit the Dax hospital a month ago. Hackers enter the hospital’s computer system and encrypt all the data which makes them unreadable for our services and then sends a ransom demand message in exchange for their original return.“ said a spokesman for the hospital.

Attacks against hospitals and health care organizations are very dangerous, especially during the ongoing pandemic, At the time of the attack, the French hospital was taking part in vaccination efforts against Covid-19.

The operations were heavily impacted by the ransomware attack, digital patient records are not available, and forced the personnel to work with pens and paper. The infection also affected the system used to monitor medicine stocks and other supplies.

“We might get our systems back in 48 hours or in three months,” hospital director Frederic Lecenne told local newspaper La Republique des Pyrenees.

In February, two other hospitals in France were hit with ransomware attacks.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, ransomware)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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