The Mossos d’Esquadra have confirmed what they already announced on March 30 and have launched a DDoS attack -or denial of service- to the RansomHouse servers on the dark web, which contained the 4.5 GB of data stolen from the Hospital ClÃnic de Barcelona, ​​in the cyberattack on March 5. If you try to access this Tor network server now, the site appears disabled.
DDoS attacks are one of the common techniques used by hackers and it consists of trying to make a website or network resource unavailable by flooding it with malicious traffic so that it cannot function properly. The attacker overloads his target with unwanted traffic so that normal traffic does not reach its intended destination.
Since the reform of the Penal Code of 2011, these types of attacks are illegal, by virtue of article 264.2 of this regulation, and are punishable by sentences of six months to two years in prison. These types of attacks are the most common today, with coordinated actions by several computers that request in unison and in a coordinated manner access to information from a server, until it exceeds its capacity to supply it, which ends up blocking it and makes access to it impossible
After the attack, RamsonHous demanded that the hospital pay $4.5 million to restore normality and the stolen data, but the center has always said that it did not intend to give in to the blackmail of cybercriminals. Among the stolen data, both the hospital itself and the Cybersecurity Agency of Catalonia, assured that there is “personal data of patients, professionals, collaborators and providers of the hospital”, as specified by the medical director, Antoni Castells.
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.
Already on March 30, Ramon Chacón, head of the General Police Station for Criminal Investigation, explained that although they initially blocked two cybercriminal servers on two different continents, in the end they could not prevent the publication of part of the stolen information. Chacón regretted that once the information reached the dark web, where it is not indexed, it is impossible to eliminate it. But it is possible to make access to mass difficult, which is what the Mossos d’Esquadra have done today.
