Newfoundland’s Recent Breach

Ransomware attacks can happen to any business, as one of Newfoundland’s popular TV and Radio stations NTV and OZ-FM just found out last week. Cybercrime group The Play has claimed responsibility for the attack on the station, stating on their dark web site that they stole client documents, as well as budget and payroll information from NTV. The company is working up and down to figure out how their data was breached and what exactly was exposed.

The Newfoundland Broadcasting Company Limited has made a response after the attack claiming that none of their services on-air were affected with NTV as such with their radio station OZ-FM. The Play cybercrime group has stated that they usually encrypt stolen data and will only release them and delete the stolen copies once the payment for them is satisfied.

The Ransomware Trend ☢️ 

As we start to see ransomware attacks target any company big and small, we would generally think there is no specific target as it seems to happen to anyone! Well, ransomware groups are starting to target manufacturing businesses more than ever actually! Manufacturing businesses can’t be shut down for long as many issues would arise and this is where ransomware groups apply the pressure.

A lot of manufacturing companies typically don’t have extensive security over their networks. Many of these businesses have come under attack by an attacker simply using one of the network user’s credentials to log in and cause harm. Methods like phishing and social engineering are amongst the most popular as the average network users in these manufacturing companies aren’t very well versed in cybersecurity principles. IBM has recently come out with their 2024 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index that claims almost 85% of attacks in the critical infrastructure network were caused by phishing emails, public-facing apps, and valid account logins.

Manufacturing businesses can face lots of damage to their data and internal processes from ransomware attacks, especially since they need to keep systems running to keep production up. Ransomware attackers can use this to their advantage to pressure the company into paying the ransom by encrypting valuable data to prevent the company from continuing their operations.

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Frequent Healthcare Attacks 🏥 

Healthcare is on the defense once again from ransomware as Change Healthcare was attacked on the 21st of February by the ransomware group known as ALPHV or BlackCat based out of Russia. ALPHV claims to of stolen over 6 terabytes of data, which include private medical records. Even though this was a couple of months ago it still comes as a big hit to the healthcare industry with negative effects such as doctors not being able to electronically fill out patient prescriptions and insurance companies not being able to reimburse providers.

Hospitals and pharmacies were forced to halt their operations for over a week! Patients were also subject to longer waiting times and lengths of stay. The UnitedHealth Group subsidiary cost the healthcare giant $872 million in damages from the ransomware attack. Not only is this hindering healthcare operations but it also raising the mortality rate as high as 21% for patients that are in these affected hospitals.

UnitedHealth Group has reluctantly come out and said that they have paid the ransom of $22 million to secure the sensitive data back and to prevent the content from being leaked onto the internet. Although the payment was made, there are still reports of these medical records being sold on the dark web.