California based health center Wood Ranch Medical will close its doors in December due to a recent ransomware attack that deleted and encrypted the firm’s patient data, according to Health IT Security.

The attack occurred in August, when the clinic’s servers were compromised. As a result, all the patient data stored on the servers was encrypted including the backup hard drives. Officials determined the hackers responsible for the attack had hopes of receiving a ransom payment before unencrypting the data. A review of the systems showed the data was too heavily encrypted and ruled out data recovery as an option. Unable to recover the patient records, Wood Ranch Medical made the decision to close in mid-December. 

Wood Ranch Medical follows previous firms hit with a devastating cyber-attack. In a recent attack on Digital Dental, around 100 dental providers were unable to access health records for their patients for almost a month. In both instances, a digital forensics analysis showed no indication that any patient information, including names, dates of birth and social security numbers, were compromised. 

A history of ransomware attacks show their occurrence on the rise. A recent study has indicated that companies who suffer a ransomware attack are hit with an average 10 days of downtime with an average of around $36,000 in recovery costs.

Email: sensei@senseient.com   Phone: 703.359.0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
https://senseient.com/services/digital-forensics

A recent post by Doug Austin of CloudNine discusses the various email addresses that one person can have and what that means when performing a search for emails sent and received by a person. We often find that clients are interested in seeing the emails that an employee or ex-employee has sent or received. In a collection of email, it is quite possible to gather thousands upon thousands of emails. Running searches across the collected data set to pull specific information of interest can generate some interesting results depending on the provided search criteria and terms. Austin mentions in the post that he can receive emails from at least three email addresses, not to mention the use of any personal email accounts that may have been used to send or receive emails.

It is important to pinpoint all variations of a certain email address when using an eDiscovery tool or performing a digital forensic examination.

Email: sensei@senseient.com   Phone: 703.359.0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
https://senseient.com/services/digital-forensics