As expected after seizing the data from the Clínic hospital through a “sophisticated” cyberattack on March 5, Ransom House has begun to disseminate information from the Barcelona hospital. The hacker company specializing in ransomware attacks has shared part of the stolen data on the dark web after the administration assured that they were not going to pay “not one cent” of the ransom demanded, an amount of around 4.5 million dollars for the 4.4 terabytes of data.
In a post on its Telegram channel, Ransom House has shared a link that leads to the stolen data accompanied by the text “we have added another one to our list. Meet the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona.” It is the first time that he publicly acknowledges being responsible for the cyberattack.
There it offers the data to third parties. Any Internet user can download them by deciding if they want to buy their entire set. In the folders and files appear administrative documents, analysis results or medical records, with names of patients and employees, as well as email messages between hospital staff and other centers or laboratories.
The ransomware attack made it necessary to deprogram elective surgeries -not urgent- and visits to the extraction center and outpatient clinics in the hours after the attack. Oncological radiotherapy sessions also had to be postponed. This type of cyberattack consists of disabling a computer system, normally in exchange for a payment to recover the information.
Ransom House is a criminal group specialized in data exfiltration that operates from outside Spain and has signed similar attacks in recent months. It is difficult to know who is behind these anonymous groups, who claim the lack of cyber defense tools and expose the vulnerability of many institutions.
