Tag: cybersecurity

Philips ISCV and Xcelera flaws

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date February 10, 2019

Philips has yet to patch a flaw that allows cybercriminals to inject ransomware or backdoors which can result in PHI at risk of compromise.

The Philips ISCV version 2.x and earlier and Xcelera 4.x and 3.x the servers contain 20 Windows services of which the executables are being present in a folder where authenticated users have write permissions. The services run as a local admin account or local system account, and if a user were to replace one of the executables with a different program, that program too would be executed with local admin or local system permissions.

Philips confirms these vulnerabilities affect their IntelliSpace Cardiovascular system version 2.3.1, 3.1 and earlier. Also impacted are version 4.x and 3.x Xcelera systems (PDF). In ISCV version 3.x and earlier and Xcelera 4.x and 3.x there are 16 Windows services flaws allow hackers to run the computer with local admin rights.

Tags cybersecurity, medical device, nist, philips, ransomware

Education

Philips medical device cyber attack

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date January 30, 2019

On August 14th, The US Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) issues two alerts for Philips medical devices: PageWriter and IntelliSpace.
Philips announced plans to patch IntelliSpace by October, roughly 45 days from the DHS announcement.

PageWriter will not be patched until “mid-2019” despite the easier, “low level” threat.

A ten month delay provides more ammunition to cyber criminals to aggressively attack healthcare. Announcing an eight to ten month delay in patching adds confusion into the medical device marketplace. The cybersecurity community expresses the need for clinics, hospitals and health systems that monthly patching is the best way to protect assets from cyber attack. Many medical devices in production at the bedside today remain connected to Windows XP PCs.

Tags cybersecurity, healthcare, medical device, orangeworm, philips, ransomware

Cyberinfrastructure Education Network Ransomware Technology

Harvard Cybersecurity

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date December 29, 2018

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.2018 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…

Tags culture, cybersecurity, data breach, healthcare, megabreach, risk management, Technology, tipping point, trends

Education

Nuance: Second medical records breach

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date May 28, 2018

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.

Tags account management, apex, cybersecurity, data breach, escription, notpetya, nuance, phi

Cyberinfrastructure Education Network Ransomware Technology

Healthcare’s 2018 threat is crypto mining

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date February 25, 2018

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.
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.

Tags crypto mining, cyber insurance, cybersecurity, healthcare, malware, medical device, ransomware