Ransomware Locks Medical Records at Great Plains Health
Patient data likely safe On Tuesday, GPHealth announced that it was canceling a large number of non-emergent patient appointments and procedures. Mel McNea, GPHealth chief executive officer, says that there is no reason to suspect that patient data was accessed but the organization will do a full audit, nevertheless. Ransomware encrypts files on affected systems and is not typically associated with data theft. The group behind Maze ransomware carried out such an attack and threatened the victim company that they would leak the stolen data unless they paid 300 bitcoin ($2.3 million at the time) for the decryption key. Well on its way to recovery A statement on Facebook from GPHealth informs that there is no reason to believe that patient information was accessed during the attack on their systems. At this moment, it is unclear what ransomware strain was used in the attack or if the ransom was paid to restore the encrypted data.