- Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso confirms cyber attacks
- Data of 1.4 million people exposed in attack
- A threat actor named Interlock claimed responsibility for the attack
Another large hospital in the United States recently suffered a cyber attack, resulting in the loss of sensitive data of more than a million patients.
In announcements posted on their websites, Texas Tech University Health Science Center and Texas Tech University Health Science Center El Paso (HSC) confirmed “a temporary outage to some computer systems and applications.”
Subsequent investigation confirmed that the outage was due to Ransomware attack, in which “certain files and folders” were deleted from the HSC network. The attack allegedly occurred on September 17 and was discovered more than a week later on September 29.
Another hospital comes under attack
The notification did not say how many people were affected or who the attackers were, but in a separate filing with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, the notification put the number affected at 1,465,000.
HSC concluded that scammers stole sensitive data such as people’s names, dates of birth, addresses, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, government-issued identification numbers, financial account information, health insurance information and medical information, including medical records numbers, billing/claims information and medical information.
The threat actor behind this attack is called Interlock, and it appears to be a relatively new ransomware operation that targets well-known organizations and demands hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom. The group recently added HSC’s data to its leak site, which revealed 2.1 million files totaling 2.6 terabytes.
In response to the attack, HSC is currently reviewing existing security policies and procedures and is implementing additional safeguards to enhance system protection and monitoring, the announcement said. HSC added that affected individuals will receive free credit monitoring services out of an abundance of caution.
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