A ransomware attack took 100 Romanian hospitals down

Authorities in Romania reported that at least 100 hospitals went offline after a ransomware attack hit the Hipocrate platform.

Authorities in Romania confirmed that a ransomware attack that targeted the Hipocrate Information System (HIS) has disrupted operations for at least 100 hospitals.

Hipocrate Information System (HIS) is a software suite designed to manage the medical and administrative activities of hospitals and other healthcare institutions.

The attack took place on February 11 and encrypted data in the production servers.

“During the night of February 11 to 12, 2024, a massive cyber ransomware attack took place on the production servers on which the HIS IT system runs. As a result of the attack, the system is down, files and databases are encrypted.” reported the Romanian Ministry of Health.

The initial number of impacted hospitals was 21, but later the authorities confirmed that the number had increased to 25. Another 79 hospitals took their systems down as a precautionary measure.

Romanian Ministry of Health added that cybersecurity specialists, including cybersecurity experts from the National Cyber Security Directorate, are monitoring the situation. The Romanian government also announced extraordinary preventive measures to prevent other hospitals from being impacted by the incident.

DNSC reported that ransomware operators employed a variant of the Phobos ransomware family known as Backmydata ransomware. The threat actors demand the payment of 3.5 BTC (about 157,000 EURO).

“Hospitals using the HIPOCRATE platform, regardless of whether they were affected or not, have since yesterday received a series of recommendations from the DNSC to properly manage the situation” reported DNSC.

• Identify affected systems and immediately isolate them from the rest of the network as well as from the Internet
• Keep a copy of the ransom message and any other communications from the attackers. This information is useful to the authorities or for further analysis of the attack
• Do not shut down the affected equipment. Stopping it will remove the evidence stored in the volatile memory (RAM)
• Collect and keep all relevant log information, from the affected equipment, but also from network equipment, firewall
• Examine the system logs to identify the mechanism by which IT infrastructure has been compromised
• Immediately inform all employees and notify affected customers and business partners of the incident and its extent
• Restore affected systems based on data backups after a full system cleanup has been performed . It is absolutely necessary to ensure that backups are intact, up-to-date and secure against attack
• Ensure that all programs, applications and operating systems are updated to the latest versions and that all known vulnerabilities are patched

At this time, it is still unclear if the threat actors have stolen sensitive data from the impacted organizations.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – ransomware, Romanian hospitals)