“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

These wise words have been recently attributed to former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, though Freakonomics actually dates it back to 1976 and a completely different context.

Regardless of who first uttered the phrase or some permutation of it, modern-day cybercriminals have taken the candid advice to heart and ramped up ransomware attacks on hospitals, labs, and other medical facilities that are engaged in the battle to keep the upper hand on Covid-19.

We all remember ransomware, right? Before the recent pandemic consumed the entire news cycle, ransomware was all the rage as malicious hackers took over increasingly larger computer networks, even those used by major universities and cities, to threaten data destruction unless their ransom demands were paid in Bitcoin.

Now the bad guys are going after the people on the frontlines who are trying to keep us alive.

screenshot of Ransomware message

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ransomware-pic.jpg

Deploying Maze

In the early stages of Covid-19, hacking groups pledged to leave hospitals and medical organizations alone for a few weeks or until the outbreak subsided. Almost immediately after these assurances were given, a London-based lab, Hammersmith Medicines Research, an outfit that was researching vaccines, found itself under attack from a ransomware variant known as Maze.

Soon similar attacks rolled out across the world. It was obvious that promises from these criminals had absolutely zero value. In the world of Dark Web entrepreneurialism, nothing is sacred, not even human life. Maybe especially not human life as it serves as the most powerful bargaining chip. Medical professionals might remember Hammersmith as the outfit that was involved with an Ebola solution a few years back and is making great strides on both Alzheimer’s disease research and the Covid front.

Maze has been the ransomware of choice (Read more...)