Skip to main content

LA Hospital Pays Ransom to Computer Hackers

Share This article

A Los Angeles hospital is back up and running after paying a hefty ransom to computer hackers.

The FBI is investigating the case at the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center where administrators were locked out of their own patient records in an attack that began on Feb. 5.

The hackers demanded a ransom of 40 bitcoins, worth about $17,000. Bitcoin is an online digital payment that's hard to trace.

Hospital CEO Allen Stefanek said they paid the ransom to restore normal operations.

"The quickest and most efficient way to restore our systems and administrative functions was to pay the ransom and obtain the decryption key," Stefanek said. "In the best interest of restoring normal operations, we did this."

Security expert Seven Gomez told local television reporters he wasn't "surprised" at their decision.

"I'm not surprised because the fact is they have a lot of sensitive identification information of the patients and of their employees," Gomez said. "I am sure the law-enforcement agencies are not happy with the fact that the hospital paid the ransom."
 
There are questions about whether the hospital did the right thing. Ransomware attacks can happen to everyone from individuals to large institutions.

There's been a steady rise in the number of such attacks, according to a report released last November by Intel Corp.'s McAfee Labs. The study expects attacks to increase in 2016 as hackers gain access to more sophisticated software.

Share This article

About The Author

CBN
News

CBN News is a national/international, nonprofit news organization that provides programming 24 hours a day by cable, satellite and the Internet. Staffed by a group of acclaimed news professionals, CBN News delivers stories to over a million viewers each day without a specific agenda. With its headquarters in Virginia Beach, Va., CBN News has bureaus in Washington D.C., Jerusalem, and elsewhere around the world. What began as a segment on CBN's flagship program, The 700 Club, in the early 1980s, CBN News has since expanded into a multimedia news organization that offers today's news headlines