CISA Pre-Ransomware Alerts Helped 154 Healthcare Organizations Save Millions in Costs
In the past year, more than 150 healthcare organizations have benefitted from alerts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) about vulnerabilities and intrusions that have helped them to implement mitigations before harm has been caused. These alerts have helped victims of attacks avoid delays to patient care and saved millions of dollars in costs.
In March 2023, CISA launched its Pre-Ransomware Notification Initiative which sees alerts issued if vulnerabilities are detected that are known to be actively exploited by ransomware groups to allow organizations to take action to prevent the vulnerabilities from being exploited. There is a dwell time after vulnerabilities have been exploited before ransomware is deployed, which can be a few hours to a few days. If organizations are alerted about an attack in the early stages, it is possible to block the attack before data theft and file encryption. Since launching the pilot program in January 2023, CISA has sent more than 1,200 such notifications, including to 154 healthcare organizations about early-stage ransomware activity.
When CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) gets tips from the cybersecurity research community, infrastructure providers, and cyber threat intelligence companies about potential early-stage ransomware activity, JCDC notifies the affected company and provides specific mitigation advice to help them rapidly respond. There have been cases where the advice has come after file encryption, and in those cases, JCDC has worked closely with the organizations to help them with their remediation efforts. One of the successes of this program was an early notification to a mass transport partner that prevented an estimated $350 million attack on critical transportation infrastructure.
In some cases, JDCD has been able to identify the exfiltrated data and provide detailed information about the intrusion to support the investigative and remediation efforts. In 2023, a Fortune 500 organization suffered a $60 million ransomware attack and CISA was able to help establish a CISO position and provided guidance to help it improve its IT infrastructure and security controls to better defend against future attacks.
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