BlackCat Re-Encrypts Henry Schein for the Second Time
Oh, crikey! A bit of a nasty cyber incident swept through our medical world recently. Let me spin you the tale.
A company by the name of Henry Schein was hit with a severe cybersecurity breach near mid-October. The poor blokes first noticed something was off on the 14th when a part of their manufacturing and distribution side experienced a cybersecurity hullabaloo. Properly spooked, they promptly cut certain systems off and took other precautionary measures to contain the incident. This, unfortunately, led to a bit of a hiccup in some of their operations. They’ve been working their socks off ever since to get the situation cleared up.
The plot thickened when a mysterious group called AlphV announced that they were the culprits of the attack. Can you imagine the cheek?
A month later, on November 13, Henry Schein released an update on the situation. A data breach occurred, they confirmed, but they hadn’t pieced together every tidbit about what data might have been nicked. This caused a bit of a fuss, as there was worry about customer bank accounts and credit card numbers being in the crosshairs.
Their CEO, a chap called Stanley Bergman, tried to soothe investors by promising that their e-commerce platform would be back up and running soon. However, the mishap seemed to mainly impact their dental and medical distribution operations in both North America and Europe.
As it turns out, the situation got worse before it got better. Negotiations with AlphV crashed and burned and BlackCat fired up their encryption again. Just as November was coming to a close, Henry Schein put out another announcement advising that their e-commerce platform, as well as certain applications, were down.
Unfortunately, the nasty piece of work behind the whole kerfuffle was none other than the prior cyber offender who’d already made their existence known. They were bent on not only causing disruption but securely resurrecting the affected platforms as well.
Over the coming days, the company gave more updates on the situation. They’d managed to identify the cause and were doing their best to get things back in order using previous work to restore their systems. They held out hope that the e-commerce platform hiccups and the unfortunate state of certain applications would be temporary.
Languishing under the cyber onslaught, they resorted to using alternative means to take customer orders and ensure shipments reached the appropriate destinations. In a recent update, they forecasted brighter days ahead, commercially speaking, with their U.S. e-commerce platform likely to be restored in the next few days and other applications in Canada and Europe following shortly after.
Sounds like a thrilling rollercoaster, doesn’t it? Well, we’ve talked about soils, now let’s hope we see the seeds of change and growth in cybersecurity, especially within healthcare. No one fancies a rerun of this pantomime, ain’t that the truth?
by Parker Bytes