In the morning of March 22, in the midst of a coronavirus epidemic, the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), responsible for managing 39 public hospitals in Île-de-France, was the victim of an attack computer science. Fortunately, this attack to overload its servers was quickly foiled, thus avoiding a critical impact. Only external access to messaging, Skype and AP-HP applications was briefly blocked, just to manage the situation.
Targeted health around the world
Hospitals in Paris are not the first to suffer such attacks since the start of the epidemic. Already on March 13, the hospital in Brno, the second largest in the Czech Republic, was forced to cut its network, disconnect its computer stations, and postpone surgical operations following a major cyber attack. A few days later, the US Department of Health in turn became the target of hackers. As the Bloomberg media report, the ministry's website was overwhelmed by millions of concurrent requests.
In France, healthcare professionals keep in mind the attack on the Rouen teaching hospital, which occurred last November. Infected with ransomware (ransomware in French), the hospital computers were completely paralyzed, forcing staff to return to good old pencil for several days.
Resistance gets organized
In response, cyber security initiatives have been launched around the world to try to protect the particularly fragile health sector in recent weeks. A few days ago, Israeli cyber expert Ohad Zaidenberg created a group aimed at fighting hackers who are taking advantage of the situation to destabilize health services. He has since been joined by more than 200 volunteers. Another group, Cyber Volunteers 19, pursues the same objectives.
Some usually malicious hackers seem to retain a touch of humanity. Contacted by the Beeping Computer site, large hacking groups, such as Maze, assured that they would not attack hospitals until the situation stabilizes. They said, however, that the pharmaceutical industry, "which earns a lot of money", would not be spared.