Server attacks and data hacking against companies are on the rise: +95% between 2020 and 2021. But what do hackers do with the data collected?
The Corbeil-Essonne hospital center (Essonne) in August 2022, the hospital André-Mignot of the Versailles Hospital Center (Yvelines) and the Rennes University Hospital have one thing in common: these three establishments have all been victims of a cyberattack.
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Reindeer “the cyberattack led to data exfiltration and analyzes are underway to qualify the amount and type of data involved”explains the establishment in a press release Thursday, June 22.
Medical data sold for a few dollars
“These hackers will threaten their victims and if ever they do not receive the money claimed, they will distribute the stolen data, either for free in blogs on spaces in the dark web or they will resell them“, explains Damien Bancal, cybersecurity specialist, author of the Zataz.com blog.
These buyers can be “anyone, malicious professionals for example“, adds the cybersecurity specialist. “We have a very concrete example of a hospital center in the east of France which was infiltrated in 2022, illustrates Damien Bancal. “Data has been exfiltrated and today you find it on search engines – shops created by hackers in which you type a name and all the health records will come out. To get them back, just pay a few dollars“, deciphers the expert.
“They have business in their minds, there is nothing personal and the consequences are however dramatic.”
Damien Bancal, cybersecurity specialistat franceinfo
Hackers also target their buyers. “Some are only interested in fishing, phishing For example, details cybersecurity expert. With the stolen data, date of birth, surname, first name, mobile phone number, e-mail address, they can pose as taxes, for health insurance. Another can send text messages as for the CPF for example, subscribe to credits by reconstituting the documents with this data.“
“Malicious Marketing”
“There is an urgency for hackers to quickly monetize this data“, adds Thierry Karsenti, cybersecurity specialist and technical vice president of Palo Alto Networks. “They encrypt them, then demand a ransom, like what we saw in Corbeil-Essonne, complement cybersecurity expert. They have even passed a milestone, because the establishments no longer pay the ransoms, so to better negotiate they copy this data and put pressure on the hospitals by threatening to broadcast everything.“
“On the internet, data is worth gold.”
Thierry Karsenti, cybersecurity specialistat franceinfo
Computer hackers also have another lever: distributing the data for free on the Internet, on forums for example. “This is malevolent marketing: they are inspired by the lessons of chinese military strategy treatise Art of War: ‘I have 100 soldiers, I will kill one and the remaining 99 will obey me’. They do exactly the same with companies“, adds Damien Bancal.
“Among our unwitting enemies are search engines that can collect them, and put them in places that potential algorithms can find in four, five years. Just type in a first and last name and search engines can spit them out like this…“, he concludes. In 2022, the National Information Systems Security Agency noted 831 proven computer intrusions against French hospitals compared to 1,082 in 2021.