Two not-for-profit hospitals in New York are seeking a court order to retrieve data stolen in an August ransomware attack and now stored on the servers of a Boston cloud storage company.
Carthage Area Hospital and Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center have founded the North Star Health Alliance, a collaborative partnership focused on providing healthcare services across the northern New York area.
Together, they serve more than 220,000 residents living in Jefferson, northern Lewis, southern St. Lawrence Counties, Ogdensburg, and St. Lawrence County.
The LockBit ransomware gang claimed responsibility for breaching and stealing sensitive files from their systems in late August, with a press release published by the hospitals one week later saying the incident forced them to redirect patients requiring urging care to other hospitals' emergency departments.
While investigating the incident with the FBI's help, the hospitals found that the data stolen by Lockbit's affiliates is now stored on the servers of Wasabi Technologies, a cloud storage company in Boston, Massachusets.
In a bid to recover the stolen data from Wasabi's servers, the hospitals have now taken legal action against the cybercriminals who stole the files, asking the court to order Wasabi to return the stolen data to the North Star Health Alliance hospitals and issue an order requiring the ransomware group to destroy all the copies they made.
According to court documents, the cloud storage firm has already provided the FBI with copies of the data requested by the hospitals.
LockBit has also disrupted emergency care at three German hospitals on Christmas Eve, forcing them to divert emergency cases elsewhere, resulting in potential critical delays.
Another LockBit affiliate attacked the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto one week before last Christmas, causing diagnostic and treatment delays.
The LockBit ransomware-as-a-service operation was first spotted in September 2019, with its victim list including the Continental automotive giant, the UK Royal Mail, the City of Oakland, and the Italian Internal Revenue Service.
A joint advisory published in June by cybersecurity authorities worldwide revealed that this ransomware gang has extorted at least $91 million from U.S. organizations following at least 1,700 attacks since 2020.
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This Cyber News was published on www.bleepingcomputer.com. Publication date: Fri, 29 Dec 2023 20:25:06 +0000