Ransomware Surges to 1.2 Million Attacks Per Month

Ransomware threat detections have risen to over one million per month this year, with a French hospital the latest to suffer a major outage.

The 1000-bed Center Hospitalier Sud Francilien (CHSF) near Paris revealed it was hit on Sunday morning, in an attack which has knocked out all the hospital’s business software, storage systems including medical imaging, and patient admissions.

This has led to all but the most urgent emergency patients being diverted to other facilities in the region.

France24 cited figures claiming cyber-attacks against French hospitals surged 70% year-on-year in 2021.

“Each day we need to rewrite patients’ medications, all the prescriptions, the discharge prescriptions,” Valerie Caudwell, president of the medical commission at CHSF hospital, reportedly said.

“For the nurses, instead of putting in all the patients’ data on the computer, they now need to file it manually from scratch.”

Reports suggest Lockbit 3.0 may be to blame for the $10m ransom demand, which the hospital is refusing to pay.

Barracuda Networks claimed in a new report out today that education, municipalities, healthcare, infrastructure and finance have remained the top five targets for ransomware over the past 12 months.

However, while attacks on local government increased only slightly, those targeting educational institutions more than doubled, and attacks on the healthcare and financial verticals tripled.

Overall, Barracuda claimed that ransomware detections between January and June of this year climbed to more than 1.2 million per month.

Fleming Shi, CTO at Barracuda, argued that small businesses need to be as alert as their larger counterparts because they are often targeted in stepping-stone attacks.

“As a result, it is essential for security providers to create products that are easy to use and implement, regardless of a company’s size,” he added. “Additionally, sophisticated security technologies should be available as services, so that businesses of all sizes can protect themselves against these ever-changing threats.”