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Cyberinfrastructure Education Network Ransomware Technology

Harvard Cybersecurity

Harvard’s cybersecurity course is certainly a demanding slice of your life. However, I gained valuable insights from Eric Rosenbach and cybersecurity leaders from National Security Agency, Akamai, and Google. In addition, this offered me an opportunity to connect with cybersecurity leaders across wide ranging business and geographic locations.harvard cybersecurity2018 proved a challenge, looking beyond repeated megabreaches that dominated news headlines. Did you suffer from breach fatigue? It was like the movie Groundhog Day.

At some point (probably sooner than we think) all the data impacting all the users connected to the global internet will all be available on the dark web. All for a price…

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Education

Nuance: Second medical records breach

Nuance UPDATE: 2017 Ransomware attacks on Healthcare The impact of last year’s global cyber attacks linger into May 2018. NotPetya wiped Nuance’s hosted services. In late December, they announced a security event. Now we understand it was their second breach.

Nuance Communications deploys very popular medical transcription services. Their US market share at hospitals, clinics and health systems is roughly 70%.

Nuance

However last June the NotPetya global cyber attack erased Nuance’s eScription medical transcription service.

Nuance lost ALL customer data due to NotPetya’s data destruction. Nuance could not restore backups of client data.

As a result hospitals and clinics lost more than 45 days of medical transcriptions which ultimately, led to delays in medical billing. Yet in almost thirty days Nuance was able to rebuild eScription, sans client transcriptions.

Then in December 2017 without any notice to healthcare organizations, Nuance shut down their Apex medical transcription service due to a “security” event.

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Education Reading Vietnam War Watergate

Latest read: The Pentagon Papers secret history

The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War by Neil Sheehan and The New York Times is an amazing story. Just re-published in December 2017, Sheehan, was an established, respected reporter on Vietnam. This period was an extraordinary time of change in our country as President Nixon expanded the war in Vietnam.

The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War by Neil SheehanSheehan obtained a complete copy of the top secret Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND consultant and contributor to the papers. The publishing of the Pentagon Papers would lead Nixon’s re-election committee, somewhat appropriately named CREEP to plan and execute the Watergate break-in. This action was a direct result of the Pentagon Papers leaking, and ultimately, Nixon’s resignation.

However the Papers, initiated by his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara date back to 1945. The initial volumes reveal the American effort to save Vietnam was effectively lost before 1960.

The most striking reports of early failure in Vietnam and Indochina occurred prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and stretched through the 1954 Geneva Conference. This put to rest an notion Vietnam was a development of the Kennedy administration.

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Cyberinfrastructure Education Milwaukee Ransomware Technology

2018 Ransomware attacks on Healthcare

The impact of ransomware, botnets and crypto mining will continue to impact hospitals and clinics in 2018.

ransomware, botnets and crypto mining

More precise, targeted attacks including botnets and crypto mining are projected to overtake global attacks hospitals witnessed with WannaCry and NotPetya.

Healthcare Information Security teams must show risk tolerance and carefully monitor new trends in malware, patch management, and change management.

Ransomware via botnets and crypto mining will continue to drive agile healthcare technology solutions, This will impact business shifts in governance and policy across US healthcare facilities as new attacks continue to focus on financial based malware.

Moving into the new year global attacks may give way to targeted attacks, botnets and crypto mining that have been branded as WannaMine.

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Cyberinfrastructure Education Network Ransomware Technology

Healthcare’s 2018 threat is crypto mining

Crypto mining attacks are more stealth than WannaCry.

Cybercriminals continue to drive crypto mining attacks on hospital computers. Some crypto mining attacks will require hospitals report a breach of PHI. If the crypto installed is the popular WannaMine, this is considered a reportable ransomware attack.crypto mining
Last year ransomware took the American healthcare industry by storm. Botnets and crypto mining experienced continued growth since 2016. The WannaCry attack on the British health system and NotPetya simply pushed them off the front pages. They did not disappear. Make no mistake, crypto mining is the new attack vector in 2018 after strong growth over the previous two years.

Tennessee hospital EMR server hit with crypto mining

On January 26th, 2018 Decatur County General Hospital in Parsons, Tennessee announced (PDF) that over 20,000 PHI records were compromised by crypto mining software discovered on the hospital’s main electronic medical records server.

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