eRAD Action on WannaCry Security Threat

For the past week, world news sources have been reporting on an international cyberattack which targeted businesses, medical facilities, and universities in over 100 countries using ransomware called “WannaCry.” These attacks crippled PCs and servers by encrypting data and then blackmailing the victim to pay for restoration.

While some of the victims paid the ransom, many did not and were faced with extreme business disruption, unrecoverable data, and inaccessible systems. The victims were likely attacked by opening a malicious email attachment, clicking a malicious link in an email, clicking a malicious link on a webpage, or opening a malicious file from a cloud-sharing service such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

eRAD was not affected by these attacks which have been officially declared “halted” by security experts and authorities. This does not mean that the threat is over. The Global Services Team has been working internally and with our technology partners to implement enhanced security countermeasures to bolster our defenses against cyberattacks.

Microsoft Security Updates:

We continue to review MS security patches and the vulnerabilities that these patches fix to ensure that the necessary patches are applied to the servers in a timely manner and that our customers are not affected by vulnerabilities that could result in downtime or compromise ePHI. All eRAD-hosted RIS customer servers have the necessary Microsoft patches applied to them to protect against the WannaCry ransomware.

Network Configurations:

eRAD reviews its network configurations to ensure that we are segmenting our customers for security to prevent vulnerabilities that can self-propagate, as is the case with the WannaCry ransomware. eRAD-hosted RIS customer systems are also configured so that they are protected by our firewalls and are not directly accessible from the public internet.

We also recommend that you apply the latest Microsoft security patches if you are running any end-of-life Microsoft operating systems such as XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, or Server 2003. Microsoft has released security updates that can be downloaded here.

2017-10-16T16:48:54-05:00