1 of largest Healthcare Newtorks Hacked -Scripps Health Networks

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100000 of vaccine database entries for the black market

This is absolutely horrible, 2 weeks later and still struggling, I wonder how much $$$ the ransom is? Scripps has a huge, award-winning hospital/clinic system here in San Diego County, and they also run the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, etc. The hospital is always trying to raise donations, so I doubt they want to give out hundreds of millions of dollars just to get their system back up and running. Now they are having to divert critical care cases, and everyone is buying malpractice insurance to cover their arses, as digital medical records are not accessible.

It is also nearly impossible to get through to the doctor's office by phone, and forget if you need dental work or something like that, and they want a doctor's note. That is what I am dealing with today. And to think of all the thousands of patient prescriptions that need filling, those are usually also sent digitally to the pharmacy. A majority of their patients are older people or the disabled, on Medicare, etc.

This is why I prefer to keep a print out of personal medical information on hand, at all times.



[link to www.USE_FULL_LINKwww.sandiegouniontribune.com (secure)]

"They won’t take appointments, they won’t answer any questions about what is happening or when they might re-open, aren’t referring people to outside doctors, and will not even allow their doctors to speak with their patients via telephone as they say they cannot do that without a functioning medical records system,” Bernitz said.

[link to www.cbs8.com (secure)]

Office doctors might work from home to do the tele visits, but they might go see patients at the hospital, depending what privileges they have.

Having worked with hospitals, the problem is, they got so many vendors, and you get a lot of external emails. I got fooled once myself and I'm pretty savvy when it comes to external emails.

An email arrived from one of the vendors we deal with and that day i was actually expecting a link to enter some data...got the email, clicked on the link, but immediately saw the URL site was compromised, so unplugged from the internet, had to call IT get my whole computer re-imaged. Now, if that happened to me, can't imagine doctors or nurses getting an email and accidentally clicking on it and getting screwed.

Many hospitals don't spend enough money on IT security and they don't pay the IT people enough so yea, they are exposed. After seeing all the ramsonware going on, some of them got smart and hire expensive security firms to do audits, and from the meetings we had, the most common way to get breached is people doing non related work stuff online. They might check their personal gmail account, and then on that gmail, they get a spam message, they click on it, and bye bye. A lot of older people work at hospitals who are not computer savvy.

AT one hospital where I was at, people were being so dumb, they actually said, any non related healthcare site you clicked that led you to a compromised site will result in getting fired after 3 strikes.