Summary:
Last week, Texas healthcare provider UMC Health System disclosed that it detected unusual activity within its IT systems and took steps to proactively disconnect systems to contain the incident. Due to the outage, medical prescription lists are unavailable at UMC clinics. As such, patients have been advised to bring their prescriptions with them when visiting. As a precaution, UMC decided to temporarily divert incoming emergency and non-emergency patients to nearby health facilities. In an update on Monday, the healthcare giant stated that it will start accepting patients via ambulance. However, a select number of patients will still be diverted until all UMC resources are fully functional. As of writing, the investigation is still ongoing, with UMC working with third parties to determine the full scope of the incident and recover systems as soon as possible.

Security Officer Comments:
Sources online have attributed the incident to a ransomware attack. However, no major ransomware groups have claimed UMC Health System on their data leak site at this time. With UMC operating 30 clinics across West Texas and Eastern New Mexico, sensitive medical information for hundreds of thousands of patients could be at risk of being compromised. Details regarding an ongoing ransomware negotiation have not been disclosed. Typically, if a ransom is not paid, these actors will publish the victim’s data to their data leak site, which can be used in further social engineering, phishing, and identity theft attacks. As a precaution, victims should be on the lookout for emails or SMS text messages from unknown senders and closely monitor their credit and financial accounts.

Suggested Corrections:
Backup your data, system images, and configurations, regularly test them, and keep the backups offline: Ensure that backups are regularly tested and that they are not connected to the business network, as many ransomware variants try to find and encrypt or delete accessible backups. Maintaining current backups offline is critical because if your network data is encrypted with ransomware, your organization can restore systems.

Update and patch systems promptly: This includes maintaining the security of operating systems, applications, and firmware in a timely manner. Consider using a centralized patch management system; use a risk-based assessment strategy to drive your patch management program.

Test your incident response plan: There's nothing that shows the gaps in plans more than testing them. Run through some core questions and use those to build an incident response plan: Are you able to sustain business operations without access to certain systems? For how long? Would you turn off your manufacturing operations if business systems such as billing were offline?

Check Your Security Team's Work: Use a 3rd party pen tester to test the security of your systems and your ability to defend against a sophisticated attack. Many ransomware criminals are aggressive and sophisticated and will find the equivalent of unlocked doors.

Segment your networks: There's been a recent shift in ransomware attacks – from stealing data to disrupting operations. It's critically important that your corporate business functions and manufacturing/production operations are separated and that you carefully filter and limit internet access to operational networks, identify links between these networks and develop workarounds or manual controls to ensure ICS networks can be isolated and continue operating if your corporate network is compromised. Regularly test contingency plans such as manual controls so that safety critical functions can be maintained during a cyber incident.

Train employees: Email remains the most vulnerable attack vector for organizations. Users should be trained how to avoid and spot phishing emails. Multi Factor authentication can help prevent malicious access to sensitive services.

Link(s):
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...es-umc-health-system-to-divert-some-patients/