What would you do in this situation?
You're a small business. A family medical clinic, actually.
In this real-life scenario, you're in Ashland, Missouri, a small town not far from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
In your practice, you have patient records for kids, their parents, and even their grandparents.
You come into the office and discover that more than the door was locked overnight. Your computers were, too.
And forget about the backups, the hacker encrypted those as well.
So what would you do if this was your clinic and these were your patients?
The Namaste Family Clinic decided to pay the ransom. Here's how they describe things in the incident announcement.
"Namaste learned of this activity on August 14, 2017, and immediately responded. First, we disabled the unauthorized user’s access and took the computer systems off-line, and with the assistance of our IT contractor, we worked to investigate, eliminate, and remediate the malware attack on the systems. We terminated any further remote access permissions pertaining to the system, and we then subsequently paid the cyber attacker’s ransom demand in order to obtain the decryption key and restore the encrypted data."
The clinic says it has been unable to confirm whether any information was actually taken. However, it has offered a year of credit monitoring.
This is more proof that everyone is a potential target for hackers and malware.
Join our threat intelligence and malware reversal experts in dissecting samples and learning how these attacks can really impact you. Sign up for our SecureWorldPLUS class on Dissecting Destructive Malware which starts November 1.
