A major ransomware attack has disrupted operations at Germany-based Fresenius Group, Europe’s largest private hospital operator whose dialysis products and services are in huge demand in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ransomware attack was first reported to security researcher Brian Krebs of KrebsOnSecurity by an employee of Fresenius Kabi, a division of the Fresenius Group that supplies pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices. The employee told Krebs that “a cyber attack had affected every part of the company’s operations around the globe” and that the malware used in the operation was the dreaded Snake ransomware. The trend of cyber criminals targeting healthcare institutions across the globe has been gaining pace recently, mostly because the use of legacy systems, unpatched medical devices and poor cyber security training at many hospitals and clinics enable criminals to sneak in malicious files to exfiltrate sensitive data or to blackmail the latter for ransom.
Source: Teiss
