Virginia Data Ransom
This is bad:
On Thursday, April 30, the secure site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) was replaced with a $US10M ransom demand:
“I have your shit! In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :(For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password.”
Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site’s homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.
[…]
Whitley Ryals said the state discovered the intrusion on April 30, after which time it shut down Web site site access to dozens of pages serving the Department of Health Professions. The state also has temporarily discontinued e-mail to and from the department pending the outcome of a security audit, Whitley Ryals said.
More. This doesn’t seem like a professional extortion/ransom demand, but still….
EDITED TO ADD (5/13): There are backups, and here’s a Q&A with details on exactly what they were storing.
Roboticus • May 7, 2009 7:42 AM
How does this idiot think he’s going to get away with this? How did he manage to destroy their backups? Why werent the patient records encrypted (Or were they?) Lots of questions at this point.