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%.
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.
The continuing ransomware threats in 2018 may shift from global attacks to botnets and cryptocurrency attacks. The financial attacks like WannaCry and NotPetya will also continue when cybercriminals can exploit known vulnerabilities on a global scale. The lessons learned from 2017 have reached a critical point for healthcare to ensure hospital attacks on IT infrastructure and medical devices are now protected. Vendors are responding with innovative solutions that may stop a ransomware encryption attack. We look forward to partnering with vendors who can provide this new level of cyber defense.
