McLaren Healthcare suffers a Ransomware Incident

The notorious BlackCat ransomware gang boasted about the attack on their dark website, after which McLaren Healthcare confirmed the ransomware attack.

McLaren Healthcare is one of the largest healthcare systems in Michigan. The BlackCat ransomware group claims to have access to sensitive data of McLaren’s 2.5 million patients and videos of hospital work, which is altogether 6TB of data.

The group did not initially name the company but added McLaren’s name hours later when the healthcare provider supposedly tried to hide the hack attack, and their spokesperson did not respond to the ransomeware group’s demands.

A spokesperson from McLaren HealthCare said that the organization came across suspicious activity on their computer network and launched an investigation to determine the cause and some of data may be available on the dark web and will notify individuals whose information was impacted.

Earlier, McLaren Healthcare reported several outages that affected its billing and healthcare record systems and the situation at McLaren gets worse that employees had to resort to communicating through their phones since computer systems at their 14 different facilities were shut down.

McLaren operates 13 hospitals across Michigan and other medical services such as infusion centers, cancer centers, primary and specialty care offices, and a clinical laboratory network. The company also runs a medical malpractice insurance company and has a total of 28,000 employees.

According to the McLaren spokesperson, their systems are still in operation, even though the BlackCat ransomware group claims to have their backdoors still running over them.

Ransomware groups are now actively targeting the hospitality sector, and people must take reliable measures to ensure their security