The IT Nerd

The New York Blood Center, one of the world’s largest independent blood collection and distribution organizations, says a Sunday ransomware attack forced it to reschedule some appointments.

Here’s what happened:

On Sunday, January 26, New York Blood Center Enterprises and its operating divisions identified suspicious activity affecting our IT systems. We immediately engaged third-party cybersecurity experts to investigate and confirmed that the suspicious activity is a result of a ransomware incident. We took immediate steps to help contain the threat and are working diligently with these experts to restore our systems as quickly and as safely as possible. Law enforcement has been notified.

We understand the critical nature of our services, and the health of our communities remains our top priority. We remain in direct communication with our hospital partners and are implementing workarounds to help restore services and fulfill orders.

Paul Bischoff, Consumer Privacy Advocate at Comparitech, commented: 

“Ransomware gangs don’t discriminate between charitable organizations and for-profit companies. Medical organizations are frequently targeted because they can’t operate for long without their computer systems, and those systems store a lot of sensitive patient and employee data. That makes hospitals and clinics more likely to pay ransoms. Furthermore, hospitals employ a lot of non-IT staff that attackers can phish.”

For the second time today, I am writing about a health care organization who has been pwned. Seriously, the fact that this sector is pretty much easy prey for threat actors needs to change. And it needs to change right now.

This entry was posted on January 31, 2025 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Hacked. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.