The effects of ransomware are always ugly. Sometimes companies are forced to pay astronomical ransoms via bitcoin, other times too few, companies are able to recover from backups. Unfortunately, on way too many occasions the company is forced to close its doors forever. Such is the case with Wood Ranch Medical in California, who had to close today due to an inability to recover from a ransomware attack.
As reported by Health IT Security, California Provider to Close After Ransomware Attack Damages System, “In August, the servers containing the electronic health records of WRM were infected with ransomware. All patient data was encrypted, including the backup hard drives. The damage to the computer system was severe enough that data recovery was not an option.
As a result, officials said it would be impossible to rebuild its medical records. WRM will close its practice and cease operations on December 17, 2019.”
The average ransomware outage is now lasting 10 days. For smaller victims, the average ransom is $36,000, but Patchworx has seen ransoms into the millions of dollars, with no guarantee of successful results. Here is a sad note from Wood Ranch Medical to their patients, “As much as I have enjoyed providing medical care to you, I will not be able to attend to you professionally after that date,” officials wrote in a statement. “Between now and December 17th, we will work with you as you seek another medical practitioner for you and your family’s healthcare needs.”
Here are some important tips you should consider to lessen your chances of being victimized by ransomware:
- Have good cybersecurity hygiene. Hire an experienced security specialist on your staff or engage a firm like Patchworx to perform a security vulnerability scan of your network. That person or firm will guide you well on what to do next.
- Make sure you are correctly applying all of your software security updates on a timely manner. This is crucial in the world of cybersecurity. Patching services like Patchworx.com, also have additional protections like dark web monitoring and cyber breach insurance.
- Make sure you have good backups of your entire system. Make sure they are off-site or disconnected from your operational network and be sure to use different login credentials than what you use with your daily systems as hackers frequently delete backups when they attack.
- There are many other cyber protection solutions like two-factor authentication, spam filtering and malware scanning of emails, end-user education through phishing test and education software tools and more. Having a full stack of protection comes from getting the right guidance from your security expert or Patchworx.com.
