SickKids Children's Hospital Bandages Up Careers Website After Intruder Breaks In
SickKids Children’s Hospital Bandages Up Careers Website After Intruder Breaks In 🚨
Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, commonly referred to as SickKids, has reported that the data of current and former staff, as well as job applicants, was exposed after an intruder exploited a security flaw in a third-party software application used by the hospital. SickKids stated that the intrusion affected its external careers site, which has now been restored. The hospital further clarified, “Clinical systems and patient information were not affected, and patient care has continued as usual.”
Details of the Breach 🔍
Current and former employees of SickKids, the SickKids Foundation, and the hospital’s Vaughan, Ontario-based Boomerang clinic may all be affected, as well as SickKids job applicants. Although the hospital did not comment on the scale of the breach, it mentioned that those affected will be offered the usual identity and credit monitoring services. SickKids added, “Our review of the impacted information is ongoing. Individuals determined to have been impacted will be notified directly, though, out of an abundance of caution, all potentially impacted individuals have been alerted and offered 24 months of complimentary credit monitoring and identity protection services.”
Previous Cyber Struggles ⚠️
The children’s hospital is no stranger to cyber struggles. On December 18, 2022, it was targeted by a LockBit ransomware affiliate - a particularly egregious attack even for LockBit that attracted an overwhelmingly negative reaction. The ransomware operator issued an ultra-rare apology on December 31, 2022, announcing that it would offer SickKids a free decryptor and that the affiliate who carried it out was expelled from the program. By that time, however, SickKids had been handling the recovery well, restoring around 60 percent of its systems after refusing to pay the crooks a ransom.
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