Ransomware Attack Disrupts Georgia Hospital’s Health Records

Ransomware attack disrupts Georgia hospital’s health records. Memorial Hospital and Manor in Bainbridge, Georgia, can no longer access its Electronic Health Record system after falling victim to a ransomware attack.

The attack, the small rural hospital said in a social media post, was discovered early Saturday morning after receiving alerts from its malware protection software.

According to the medical and surgical hospital services provider, its operations were not affected by the attack. However, the hospital’s staff implemented downtime procedures, reverting to pen and paper to record patient information.

“While we believe this issue will not impact either the level or the quality of care we provide to our patients, we want to be fully transparent regarding this situation,” Memorial Hospital and Manor said on Sunday.

“Please bear with us as you may experience longer wait times when you come to either the hospital or physician offices as we are working on a paper-based process,” the hospital said.

Memorial Hospital and Manor launched an investigation into the incident and started working on restoration and recovery plans.

While it said that ransomware was used in the attack, the hospital did not say whether any data was stolen from its systems and it is unclear whether any patient information was compromised.

On Monday, however, the Embargo ransomware gang claimed responsibility for the incident, adding Memorial Hospital and Manor to its Tor-based leaks site and claiming the theft of 1.15 terabytes of data.

The group is threatening to make the allegedly stolen data public on November 8 unless a ransom is paid until then.

A relatively new group operating under a ransomware-as-a-service (Raas) business model, Embargo emerged earlier this year. The same as other ransomware gangs out there, the Embargo gang engages in double extortion, stealing data and pressuring the victims into paying a ransom.

Roughly two weeks ago, ESET reported seeing a new toolkit consisting of a loader and an endpoint detection and response (EDR) killer, dubbed MDeployer and MS4Killer, respectively, which were used in Embargo ransomware deployments.