The aftermath of a ransomware assault final month demonstrates simply how unhealthy an assault can get when the cybercriminals don’t get what they need.
Think about you get hit with ransomware, you refuse to pay the ransom, you haven’t any cyber insurance coverage, and the attackers launch hundreds of thousands of data of buyer knowledge. It’s a nightmare state of affairs for any group – and precisely what occurred to Medibank final month.
Upon being made conscious of the encrypted knowledge and methods, Medibank’s investigations discovered that hackers had important entry to their knowledge, together with:
- All private knowledge and well being claims knowledge from subsidiary AHM Well being Insurance coverage
- All worldwide pupil clients’ private knowledge and well being claims knowledge
- All Medibank clients’ private knowledge and well being claims knowledge
24 hours after a ransom warning was made that threatened the leaking of the exfiltrated knowledge, parts of Medibank’s stolen knowledge was revealed, pushing them into the highlight. Hackers have warned that the information revealed up to now is simply part of the full knowledge set they’ve, doubtlessly leaving the door open to future extortion.
I do need to say that this isn’t a story designed to warn you that organizations ought to pay the ransom. Ideally nobody ought to as a result of that solely encourages the unhealthy actors. As a substitute, the takeaway from this text the truth that organizations must make each effort to maintain an assault like this from ever taking place – one thing that features a layered safety technique primarily based on identified assault strategies, the best of which incorporates phishing assaults. E-mail safety, DNS scanning, and Safety Consciousness Coaching to correctly fend off email-based assaults (which is the major assault vector in ransomware assaults.)
