Hospitals, targets of choice for cybercriminals during a pandemic

March 25, 2020

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In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, hackers attacked health establishments from all sides, like the Paris Hospitals on March 22 last. One way to make money by taking advantage of the current health crisis.

As the world begins to cloister themselves at health home to avoid clogging hospitals with new cases of coronavirus, they face a different kind of threat. As the magazine revealed L'Express, Paris hospitals were victims of a computer attack on March 22.

Sunday afternoon, the servers of the AP-HP were indeed the target of a denial of service attack (DDOS) aimed at paralyzing the establishment's computer network. Far from being a particularly advanced attack, denial of service has the advantage of being able to be executed by any Internet user, even if it is slightly equipped. If the attack never reached the infrastructure of the establishment, it reveals the appetite of malicious actors for health establishments in this period of pandemic.

Guillaume Poupard, the director general of ANSSI had warned from the start of the epidemic than "the attackers have no ethics so they would be able to attack CHUs during a crisis". Hospitals, already in tension, would be in the current situation more inclined to pay possible ransoms to regain access to their networks as quickly as possible.

WHO also affected

The attack on the AP-HP is not the first of its kind. On March 15, the American social security site was bombarded by several million simultaneous requests, not enough to bring the site to its knees, but, according to Bloomberg, the manager is probably to be found on the side of a state actor.

"At times like this, any information on remedies, tests or vaccines related to the coronavirus would be invaluable and the priority of any intelligence organization", explained Costin Raiu, manager at Kaspersky, at Reuters. The comment followed a computer attack on the World Health Organization (WHO) site.

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