California Hospital Pays $17K Ransom to Hackers Who Crippled Their Systems

A Los Angeles hospital has paid a 40 bitcoin ($16,664 at current value) ransom after doctors spent over a week locked out of their patient records when their network was crippled by hackers.

The hackers breached the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center’s system February 5, initially demanding $3.6 million in bitcoins to return control to the staff at Los Feliz hospital. Without access to their network, the staff, including doctors and nurses, relied on telephone, fax, and in-person communication.

Additionally, hospital staff could not access the treatment history of patients, as well as the results of X-rays, CT scans, or other medical tests. All patient registration was done manually.

While the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI are working to identify the culprits, the hospital determined that they could not wait any longer and paid a significantly reduced ransom to regain access to their systems.

It was not revealed how the ransom reduction negotiations or the bitcoin transfer took place.

"The quickest and most efficient way to restore our systems and administrative functions was to pay the ransom and obtain the decryption key," hospital CEO Allen Stefanek said in a statement. "In the best interest of restoring normal operations, we did this."

The hospital maintained that patient care was not compromised, adding that the goal of the attack seemed to be less about gaining access to patient records and more about keeping the hospital locked out until a ransom was collected. It also seems as though the hospital was not specifically targeted, but was the subject of a random attack, meaning someone on the staff likely unknowingly clicked an infected link which installed a virus.

This type of virus, often referred to as ransomware, infects a computer or server, and then uses publicly available encryption methods to lock the contents. The encryption is strong enough to prevent the FBI from cracking it. Hackers then offer the key to decrypt the files to the victim, for a fee.