The National Cyber Security Agency is hoping that by next week it will be able to begin to ease the misery of the millions of sick people and their loved ones who have had their lives disrupted, their treatment delayed, their appointments cancelled and their healthcare worries exacerbated by the cruel and callous actions of an organised cyber crime gang.
The State's Cyber Security Response Team along with commercial IT contractors FireEye and international partners have been working 24 hour shifts on a decryption key supplied by the criminal gang so they can use it on the HSE systems. It is complicated and painstaking work.
Criminal gangs spend millions on designing and inserting malware into IT systems all over the world that enables them to encrypt data and steal it for ransom. They don’t spend as much time or money on the decryption key, the result being that while the codes when handed over may work to some extent, they may also contain 'bugs’ which do more damage to the systems and the data they’re supposed to restore.
Colonial Pipeline, the company providing almost half of the fuel for the East Coast of the United States, discovered this to its cost after it was hacked by a criminal gang referred to as ‘Darkside’ on 7 May last. It paid the criminals $4.4m for the key to unlock the encryption and while the code provided was of some use, it didn’t immediately restore the pipeline’s systems.
Timeline of the attack
Six days after the US attack officials at the Department of Health here noticed suspicious activity on their computer systems and contacted the National Cyber Security Agency. Based at the Department of the Environment in Adelaide Road in Dublin and wit ..
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