Washington MedStar is an association of several major hospitals in Washington, DC. They announced today that their IT systems have been infected with ransomware. They were given 10 days to pay $19K or face the loss of all medical records. So far they have chosen not to pay and have started to rebuild there systems. They continue to operate with paper records and appear to be up and running announcing that they have performed 800 medical procedures since being infected.
Omg
backup backup backup...
Even some companies can not afford a backup, I doubt, a hospital can.
I think even if the have good backups it takes lots of time to clean and restart all the systems and get users back on line. MedStar has ten major hospitals in the Washington Metro area. Imagine how many users that is - yikes. Just thinking about that much support gives me a headache!
It can't be that bad. There are free alternatives to paid backup. And making and restoring a backup isn't that time intensive.
not at an enterprise level. I work at a company with maybe 1300 employees. We have ~1.5PB of data across ~500 CIFS/NFS NetApp volumes with around 17,000 snapshots, and ~1700 servers with a bunch more CIFS shares on those. Backup is a huge job, and it's hugely expensive. Just the software licensing to handle all that is >$0.5M.It can't be that bad. There are free alternatives to paid backup. And making and restoring a backup isn't that time intensive.
We could have a couple of full-time employees who did nothing but focus on that, and that's assuming things are humming along and the need to restore only happens at small scales. If something took out everything, it would take a lot of folks working around the clock to recover.
I used to work in health care. You'd be surprised how much data they have to keep and for how long -- 7 years for HIPAA.
Then you must take a more proactive approach. It seems most ransomware gets trigged "mostly" when opening infected email attachments.
Time to do a double check in how security is laid out and probably adding several layers of it.
Your spot on. The museum I worked at before I retired had about 5000 staffers (both full and part time) and backing up at an enterprise level is a big deal the consumes lots of resources. We never had to recover from this type of disaster but the level of effort needed to do this would be major. I can only imagine what it must have been like recovering and taking care of critically sick people at the same time.not at an enterprise level. I work at a company with maybe 1300 employees. We have ~1.5PB of data across ~500 CIFS/NFS NetApp volumes with around 17,000 snapshots, and ~1700 servers with a bunch more CIFS shares on those. Backup is a huge job, and it's hugely expensive. Just the software licensing to handle all that is >$0.5M.
We could have a couple of full-time employees who did nothing but focus on that, and that's assuming things are humming along and the need to restore only happens at small scales. If something took out everything, it would take a lot of folks working around the clock to recover.
I used to work in health care. You'd be surprised how much data they have to keep and for how long -- 7 years for HIPAA.
