Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Maryland Confirms Ransomware Attack at Health Agency

The disruption of Maryland’s reporting of COVID-19 data last month was caused by a ransomware attack, state officials said Wednesday.

Chip Stewart, the state’s chief information security officer, said the state has not paid extortion demands for the attack, which began on Dec. 4.

The disruption of Maryland’s reporting of COVID-19 data last month was caused by a ransomware attack, state officials said Wednesday.

Chip Stewart, the state’s chief information security officer, said the state has not paid extortion demands for the attack, which began on Dec. 4.

“While the investigation is ongoing — and is occurring on a parallel track to our restoration efforts — we can confirm this much today: this was, in fact, a ransomware attack,” Stewart said.

Stewart declined to talk about any motive for the cyberattack on the state health department.

“Unlike many organizations, which take days or weeks to contain security incidents, MDH was able to isolate and contain its systems within several hours of first detecting the incident,” Stewart said.

As a result of containment measures, some some services were rendered unavailable and some remain offline.

“We are recovering with deliberate action to minimize the likelihood of reinfection,” Stewart said.

Related: Maryland Department of Labor Announces Data Breach

Related: Maryland Officials Warn Gun Dealers About Phishing Scams

Related: Cyberattack on Alaska Health Department Linked to State-Sponsored Hackers

Written By

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Application Security

PayPal is alerting roughly 35,000 individuals that their accounts have been targeted in a credential stuffing campaign.

Cybercrime

No one combatting cybercrime knows everything, but everyone in the battle has some intelligence to contribute to the larger knowledge base.

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...