Park DuValle Community Health Center Paid $70K In Ransomware Attack

In the summer of 2019, a Kentucky health center paid $70,000 in ransom to retrieve access to patient records held hostage in a ransomware attack. 

As technology advances, information security has become a hot button issue in many industries. One problem is cyberattacks in the form of ransomware. According to the Department of Homeland Security, an increase of these type of attacks has been seen worldwide. The attack on Park DuValle Community Health Center, a nonprofit that runs medical clinics serving low income patients and those without insurance, is just one example of this growing problem.

On July 7, 2019, the health center lost access to all of its patients records in a ransomware attack. The hackers demanded a $70,000 ransom payment to reinstate the hospital’s access to its own data.

The hospital agreed and paid the ransom in installments of bitcoin, a kind of cryptocurrency. To this day, the identity of the hackers is unknown. 

According to a Park DuValle representative, once the health care center paid the ransom money, the hackers sent encryption keys to regain access.

Park DuValle Community Health Center stated that while the hospital was unable to access its systems, the hackers did not steal patient information, as would be the case in a data breach. The information was merely inaccessible to them because it was encrypted. Local news station WDRB reported that Park DuValle CEO Elizabeth Ann Hagan-Grigsby stressed that “nothing got exposed; nothing at all. However, we can’t read what’s in here. It’s like having a piece of paper and it’s in a foreign language that you don’t understand.”

InfoSec explains that hackers can use multiple types of encryption to prevent organizations from accessing their records.

However, Roman Yampolskiy, director of the Cyber Security Laboratory at the University of Louisville, was not so sure. He said that “it’s possible if the hackers’ goal was not information but to extract a ransom, but I wouldn’t trust such safety claims from anyone who failed twice in three weeks at securing their data,” pointing to a previous ransomware attack that Park DuValle fell victim to shortly before the most recent attack.

Hagan-Grigsby had first stated that three separate IT companies confirmed that there had been no breach of data, but when asked by WDRB for the names of the IT companies, she said she had misspoken and that only Park DuValle’s internal IT team found that no information had been breached.

As referenced by Yampolskiy, the latest ransomware attack was not Park DuValle’s first. A ransomware attack that began on April 2, 2019, prohibited the healthcare center from accessing its records for about three weeks. 

Park DuValle did not pay the hackers in the first ransomware attack, as the company was able to rebuild its records from backups of the information. However, this was not possible after the second attack, hence the need to pay the hackers, reports WDRB. According to the news source, the second data breach prevented the Park DuValle from accessing its data for at least seven weeks, impeding many services and functions along the way. 

Join a Free Hospital Ransomware Attack Class Action Lawsuit Investigation

If you were a patient at a hospital or healthcare facility affected by a ransomware attack that impacted your medical care, you may qualify to join a hospital ransomware attack class action lawsuit investigation.

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This article is not legal advice. It is presented
for informational purposes only.