Harm patients if the medical facilities don't pay Extortionists are now threatening to harm hospital patients if the medical facilities don't pay the thieves' ransom demands.
They do this by reporting bomb threats or other fictitious reports to the police, causing heavily armed police to come up at victims' houses.
Criminals vowed to turn on the patients directly after breaking into the IT system of Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in November and taking medical documents, including Social Security numbers, diagnoses, and lab results.
The idea seems to be that the US hospital will be under pressure to pay up and stop the extortion because of those patients and the media coverage of any swatting.
Similar tactics are used by other groups targeting IT service providers: in addition to extorting the suppliers, they often threaten or harass the customers of those companies.
The cancer center refuses to respond to further questions regarding the threats.
The center has more than ten clinics in the Puget Sound region of Washington.
During this incident, hackers may have gained access to personal information.
Some of these individuals later complained that they received emails from unscrupulous people threatening to sell their personal information on the dark web.
Some corporate types may not find these types of boilerplate responses to be as comforting as they seem.
Concerning concerns are raised about how far thieves may go to obtain stolen goods in light of this most recent swatting threat.
The security shop demanded earlier this week that ransom payments be outlawed entirely, pointing out that extortion methods were evolving and now included swatting threats.
This Cyber News was published on www.cysecurity.news. Publication date: Mon, 08 Jan 2024 15:13:04 +0000