healthcare | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an advanced version of the Qilin ransomware sporting increased sophistication and tactics to evade detection. The new variant is being tracked by cybersecurity firm Halcyon under the moniker Qilin.B. "Notably, Qilin.B now supports AES-256-CTR encryption for systems with AESNI capabilities, while still retaining Chacha20 for systems that lack this support," the Halcyon Research Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Additionally, RSA-4096 with OAEP padding is used to safeguard encryption keys, making file decryption without the attacker's private key or captured seed values impossible." Qilin, also known as Agenda , first came to the attention of the cybersecurity community in July/August 2022, with initial versions written in Golang before switching to Rust. A May 2023 report from Group-IB revealed that the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) scheme allows its affiliates to anywhere between 80% to 85% of ...

Cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. have warned about a year-long campaign undertaken by Iranian cyber actors to infiltrate critical infrastructure organizations via brute-force attacks. "Since October 2023, Iranian actors have used brute force and password spraying to compromise user accounts and obtain access to organizations in the healthcare and public health (HPH), government, information technology, engineering, and energy sectors," the agencies said in a joint advisory. The attacks have targeted healthcare, government, information technology, engineering, and energy sectors, per the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the Australian Signals Directorate's Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE), the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the National Security Agency (NSA). Another notable tactic out...

Cybersecurity in healthcare has never been more urgent. As the most vulnerable industry and largest target for cybercriminals, healthcare is facing an increasing wave of cyberattacks. When a hospital's systems are held hostage by ransomware, it's not just data at risk — it's the care of patients who depend on life-saving treatments. Imagine an attack that forces emergency care to halt, surgeries to be postponed, or a cancer patient's private health information used for extortion. This is the reality healthcare faces as cybercriminals exploit people who need care. Healthcare accounted for 17.8% of all breach events and 18.2% of destructive ransomware events since 2012 1 , surpassing other sectors like finance, government, and education. This alarming rise in attacks makes one thing clear: poor cybersecurity hygiene is the root cause, and the consequences for failing to address these vulnerabilities are devastating. Organizations that neglect basic cybersecurity practices, like sof...

Microsoft has revealed that a financially motivated threat actor has been observed using a ransomware strain called INC for the first time to target the healthcare sector in the U.S. The tech giant's threat intelligence team is tracking the activity under the name Vanilla Tempest (formerly DEV-0832). "Vanilla Tempest receives hand-offs from GootLoader infections by the threat actor Storm-0494, before deploying tools like the Supper backdoor, the legitimate AnyDesk remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool, and the MEGA data synchronization tool," it said in a series of posts shared on X. In the next step, the attackers proceed to carry out lateral movement through Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and then use the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Provider Host to deploy the INC ransomware payload. The Windows maker said Vanilla Tempest has been active since at least July 2022, with previous attacks targeting education, healthcare, IT, and manufacturing secto...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two security flaws in Microsoft's Azure Health Bot Service that, if exploited, could permit a malicious actor to achieve lateral movement within customer environments and access sensitive patient data. The critical issues, now patched by Microsoft, could have allowed access to cross-tenant resources within the service, Tenable said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. The Azure AI Health Bot Service is a cloud platform that enables developers in healthcare organizations to build and deploy AI-powered virtual health assistants and create copilots to manage administrative workloads and engage with their patients. This includes bots created by insurance service providers to allow customers to look up the status of a claim and ask questions about benefits and services, as well as bots managed by healthcare entities to help patients find appropriate care or look up nearby doctors. Tenable's research specifically focuses on on...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday unsealed an indictment against a North Korean military intelligence operative for allegedly carrying out ransomware attacks against healthcare facilities in the country and funneling the payments to orchestrate additional intrusions into defense, technology, and government entities across the world. " Rim Jong Hyok and his co-conspirators deployed ransomware to extort U.S. hospitals and health care companies, then laundered the proceeds to help fund North Korea's illicit activities," said Paul Abbate, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). "These unacceptable and unlawful actions placed innocent lives at risk." Concurrent with the indictment, the U.S. Department of State announced a reward of up to $10 million for information that could lead to his whereabouts, or the identification of other individuals in connection with the malicious activity. Hyok, part of a hacking crew dubbed Andarie...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday  added  a security flaw impacting NextGen Healthcare Mirth Connect to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-43208  (CVSS score: N/A), concerns a case of unauthenticated remote code execution arising from an incomplete patch for another critical flaw CVE-2023-37679 (CVSS score: 9.8). Details of the vulnerability were first revealed by Horizon3.ai in late October 2023, with additional technical specifics and a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit released earlier this January. Mirth Connect is an open-source data integration platform widely used by healthcare companies, allowing for data exchange between different systems in a standardized manner. CVE-2023-43208 is "ultimately related to insecure usage of the Java XStream library for unmarshalling XML payloads," security researcher Naveen Sunkava...

Security researchers have disclosed almost a dozen security flaws impacting the GE HealthCare Vivid Ultrasound product family that could be exploited by malicious actors to tamper with patient data and even install ransomware under certain circumstances. "The impacts enabled by these flaws are manifold: from the implant of ransomware on the ultrasound machine to the access and manipulation of patient data stored on the vulnerable devices," operational technology (OT) security vendor Nozomi Networks  said  in a technical report. The security issues impact the Vivid T9 ultrasound system and its pre-installed Common Service Desktop web application, which is exposed on the localhost interface of the device and allows users to perform administrative actions. They also affect another software program called EchoPAC that's installed on a doctor's Windows workstation to help them access multi-dimensional echo, vascular, and abdominal ultrasound images. That being said, s...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ordered mental telehealth company Cerebral from using or disclosing personal medical data for advertising purposes. It has also been fined more than $7 million over charges that it revealed users' sensitive personal health information and other data to third-parties for advertising purposes and failed to honor its easy cancellation policies. "Cerebral and its former CEO, Kyle Robertson, repeatedly broke their privacy promises to consumers and misled them about the company's cancellation policies," the FTC  said  in a press statement. While claiming to offer "safe, secure, and discreet" services in order to get consumers to sign up and provide their data, the company, FTC alleged, did not clearly disclose that the information would be shared with third-parties for advertising. The agency also accused the company of burying its data sharing practices in dense privacy policies, with the company engaging in decept...

The U.S. government is warning about the resurgence of BlackCat (aka ALPHV) ransomware attacks targeting the healthcare sector as recently as this month. "Since mid-December 2023, of the nearly 70 leaked victims, the healthcare sector has been the most commonly victimized," the government  said  in an updated advisory. "This is likely in response to the ALPHV/BlackCat administrator's post encouraging its affiliates to target hospitals after operational action against the group and its infrastructure in early December 2023." The alert comes courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The BlackCat ransomware operation suffered a major blow late last year after a coordinated law enforcement operation led to the  seizure of its dark leak sites . But the takedown turned out to be a failure after the group managed to regain control of the...

On Thanksgiving Day 2023, while many Americans were celebrating, hospitals across the U.S. were doing quite the opposite. Systems were failing. Ambulances were diverted. Care was impaired. Hospitals in three states were  hit by a ransomware attack , and in that moment, the real-world repercussions came to light—it wasn't just computer networks that were brought to a halt, but actual patient care itself.  Cybercriminals are more brazen than ever, targeting smaller healthcare organizations for big payouts. Sure, it would be nice to believe thieves once lived by a code of conduct, but if one ever existed, it's been torn to shreds and tossed into the wind. Sophisticated hacker groups are now more than happy to launch cyberattacks on medical clinics, nursing homes, and other health service providers. Small- to mid-sized healthcare organizations have, unfortunately, become vulnerable targets from which cybercriminals can easily steal sensitive data, extort heavy ransoms, and, wors...

Governments from Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. have imposed financial sanctions on a Russian national for his alleged role in the 2022 ransomware attack against health insurance provider Medibank. Alexander Ermakov (aka blade_runner, GistaveDore, GustaveDore, or JimJones), 33, has been tied to the breach of the Medibank network as well as the theft and release of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) belonging to the Australian company. The ransomware attack, which  took place in late October 2022  and attributed to the  now-defunct REvil ransomware crew , led to the unauthorized access of approximately 9.7 million of its current and former customers. The stolen information included names, dates of birth, Medicare numbers, and sensitive medical information, including records on mental health, sexual health and drug use. Some of these records were leaked on the dark web. As part of the trilateral action, the sanctions  make  it a criminal offense t...

The Iranian state-sponsored threat actor known as  OilRig  deployed three different downloader malware throughout 2022 to maintain persistent access to victim organizations located in Israel. The three new downloaders have been named ODAgent, OilCheck, and OilBooster by Slovak cybersecurity company ESET. The attacks also involved the use of an updated version of a known OilRig downloader dubbed  SampleCheck5000  (or SC5k). "These lightweight downloaders [...] are notable for using one of several legitimate cloud service APIs for [command-and-control] communication and data exfiltration: the Microsoft Graph OneDrive or Outlook APIs, and the Microsoft Office Exchange Web Services (EWS) API," security researchers Zuzana Hromcová and Adam Burgher  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. By using well-known cloud service providers for command-and-control communication, the goal is to blend with authentic network traffic and cover up the group's attack...