A new digital extortion campaign targeting health care services provider Vastaamo is allegedly threatening to leak patients’ therapy notes if demands are not met. Vastaamo has been working with both law enforcement and private security firm Nixu to determine solutions to remediate the attack. Vastaamo claims that at least one database of patient information was breached in November 2018, and again in mid-March of 2019. Although the number of patients affected is unknown, the National Bureau of Investigation conceded that the number could be in the tens of thousands.
The hackers have been demanding roughly $230 from victims within 24 hours of the attack to protect their sensitive therapy data. Roughly 300 Vastaamo patients’ data has already been leaked via an anonymous web service hosted on Tor. Vastaamo has also allegedly received a ransom demand totaling $530,000 in exchange for safeguarding the data. Although it is unknown what caused the attacks, it is likely that cybercriminals gained access to the sensitive information through hacking the Vastaamo database, and then utilized the data to perform individual extortion attacks.
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