This is only one of the many questions we asked Mr. Andre about cyber security and how healthcare facilities can protect themselves. Check out all of them here:

Our guest on Healthcare Matters is Tom Andre, VP of Information Services at Cooperative of American Physicians (CAP). In part 1 of our What You Need to Know: Hospital Ransomware Attacks , we ask Mr. Andre to technically define ransomware attacks and how they work. This information is important in the wake of the numerous hospital attacks occurring all around the country, including the one against Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center.

Transcript

Mike Matray: On today’s episode, we’re going to discuss the recent malware attack on Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital’s computer network. Could you give us a brief synopsis of what happened in this instance?

Tom Andre: Sure. Now, I should say that I do not have an insider’s knowledge of what happened there, but this was a Ransomware attack, which is very, very common these days. And I can talk about that, generally, the types of things we should all be worried about with Ransomware and what may have happened with them. Ransomware is a type of computer infection, typically comes into an organization through a social engineering attack, either a phishing attack, email, or clicking on an infected website.

Once a computer is infected with the malware, it begins to encrypt files that are on that computer and also will go out to any network resources that it can find and encrypt those documents as well. Once it’s done its dirty work, then a message will pop up that will say, “Your files have been encrypted. If you want to get them back, here’s how to do it.” Generally, there’s a ransom that needs to be paid to do it, if you have no other way of getting your files back.