After injecting cancer hospital with ransomware, crims threaten to swat patients::Remember the good old days when ransomware crooks vowed not to infect medical centers?
Can’t wait for the GTA Online players to swat me in my home… wait we don’t have a SWAT that automatically kicks doors in without any question, so shove that threat up yours, hackers!
Jokes aside, the “swatting” being a term and applicable threat method is pretty sad. Especially when the duty officers responsible for your protection can be the ones that can put your life at risk with unverified reasons bordering institutional paranoia.
Especially when the duty officers responsible for your protection can be the ones that can put your life at risk with unverified reasons bordering institutional paranoia.
How black America has always seen police
Bordering? There’s a university whose police department has a fucking anti mine personnel carrier in my state. It was designed for wartime Baghdad not Columbus during Pax Americana, but there it is. As a white woman I’m scared of cops because there’s nobody less hesitant to kill than a scared cop, but I also know that they do hesitate to kill scared white women. They don’t hesitate to kill black people. They’re taught that if they’re scared and don’t respond with violence that’s how they die and we don’t punish that behavior, we just give them military equipment
If only hospitals weren’t such lucrative businesses with millions of dollars to pay a ransom, they wouldn’t be a target. No one is targeting ransomware to the Fire Departments or DMV.
The Dallas Fire Department was sure affected in their ransomware attack. https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/dallas-ransomware-attack-progress-one-week-later/287-f0af11f2-1c52-4d33-a706-8fdfa1f0e5f1
Municipalities are absolutely targeted by ransomware attacks. Texas has had several cities get hit within the past year or two alone. It takes down everything from their courts to their emergency services and water bill systems.
I mean most ransomware isn’t targeted at all.
Its more likely that they are required to have insurance that would cover ransomware due to the sensitive information they have on patients
It’s this. It’s also one of the most profitable forms of insurance for the insurance companies since everyone needs it but few end up using it, and the fact that insurance exists at all drives the prices way up (like every other industry they touch).
On the other hand, once people started paying, the ransomware scene became an actual industry. Before, the “send money to this number to get your files back” part was a bonus scam and you’d almost never get a response, so getting ransomed was a death sentence for a business that didn’t have working backups. Now the encryption key is sent 99% of the time the ransom is paid, and larger groups even offer tech support to their victims if they have trouble decrypting.
Source: half-remembered snippets from last year’s CompTIA Network Security course. Can’t actually double check it since we live in a capitalist hellscape where information is rented and goes poof after a few months.
The NHS in the UK gets targeted all the time and they aren’t exactly rolling in cash
Finnish municipal services get targeted
Not yet, anyways.
Crims?
Hey Choom, we have some Crims stealing X-plo at the Swarnolisa. Make sure to bring the Yookles for backup.
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Habbo Hotel?
Swatting was a thing ten years ago, and our law enforcement departments don’t care. So its not surprising to me criminal elements would take advantage of our trigger happy state-funded racketeering mobs.
One would think the police have an interest in their swat teams not being so easy to ambush.
Well, this involves a bit of a deep dive.
In the 1980s, SWAT departments were a thing of municipal regions. The Los Angeles SWAT team served the whole county. The San Francisco SWAT team served the whole bay area. They were a crack team specifically for hostage-barricade situations, the kinds of incidents that inspire based on a true story action movies. At the time, we had about 500 incidents a year across the US. According to a friend who was training in the SFPD at the time, the SWAT guys were always training in the same complex as they were and were always chomping at the bit for their one or two missions a year.
Then, in the late 80s, early 90s, George H. W. Bush implemented the 1033 program. Rather than selling military hardware as surplus, it would be handed over to law enforcement. Suddenly, precincts could sign up and get an infusion of really-cool-looking hardware, like M-16 style weapons, camouflage body armor, MRAPs, tanks and so on. What typically happened is every precinct started a volunteer SWAT service, where officers could be assigned SWAT Training which was unboxing and playing with all this new military hardware. It was a ton of fun!
Of course they wanted to play with this stuff on the field, so any time there was an incident that might include the opportunity to shoot a bad-guy (that is, a suspect, typically a US citizen and civilian) they’d send their local SWAT team.
By the Aughts (George W. Bush), SWAT deployment had climbed to 50,000 incidents nationwide. 50,000-ish is also the number of dogs slain every year by law enforcement. (It’s common policy before a SWAT raid to kill any dogs on the premises, so there’s some correlation, but also police in the US just like to shoot dogs.) SWAT is now used to serve just about any warrant, and routinely kills people at wrong addresses. Obama ceased the 1033 program after the killing of Michael Brown and the Ferguson unrest in 2014 (which put on sharp display how Missouri police are poorly-disciplined and heavily armed, drawing a lot of criticism from the actual military). But Trump and Sessions reinstated it, and now it’s a pretty permanent thing. In fact, we’ve had some racketeers create precincts, get bunches of equipment which were then sold to foreign NGOs for a killing. In the United States, oversight of law enforcement is much like oversight of churches, almost non-existent, so there’s lots and lots of room for abuse.
Anyway in the 2020s when we’re talking about SWAT, we’re almost never talking about the sub-department of the Special Operations Bureau of municipalities that trains every day for their one hostage-barricade incident. We’re talking about ordinary police who take a couple of weekend workshops on special tactics so they get to shoot the fun guns and wear the fancy armor. And yes, they’re glad to blast down the door of some hapless gamer because one of the gamer’s rivals social-engineered a police hotline. The United States is a really scary place.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Extortionists are now threatening to swat hospital patients — calling in bomb threats or other bogus reports to the police so heavily armed cops show up at victims’ homes — if the medical centers don’t pay the crooks’ ransom demands.
After intruders broke into Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s IT network in November and stole medical records – everything from Social Security numbers to diagnoses and lab results – miscreants threatened to turn on the patients themselves directly.
“Ransoms have been allowed to reach lottery jackpot levels, and the predictable upshot is that people are willing to use more and more extreme measures to collect a payout,” Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow told The Register.
Earlier this week, the security shop called for a complete ban on ransom payments, noting that extortion tactics were becoming more extreme and now include swatting threats.
Sam Rubin, VP of Unit 42 Consulting at Palo Alto Networks, told The Register his team hadn’t seen any swatting attempts by extortion crews in 2023, though the shift in tactics seems likely.
The consulting and incident response unit has also witnessed miscreants sending flowers to a victim company’s executive team, and issuing ransom demands via printers connected to the affected firm’s network.
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