Notorious ransomware gang LockBit"formally apologized" for an extortion attack against Canada's largest children's hospital that the criminals blamed on a now-blocked affiliate group, and said it published a free decryptor for the victim to recover the files.
"The partner who attacked this hospital violated our rules, is blocked and is no longer in our affiliate program," LockBit reportedlyToronto's Hospital for Sick Children said the"code grey" cybersecurity incident affecting several network systems started at 2130 local time on December 18. "Upon learning of this incident, we immediately activated the hospital's incident management command center and launched an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident," according to a December 19"At this time, the incident appears to have only impacted a few internal clinical and corporate systems, as well as some hospital phone lines and webpages," the alert continued.
Last year's victims included at least 105 local governments, 44 universities and colleges,45 school districts, and 25 health-care providers operating 290 hospitals. This new tally is, sadly,"surprisingly consistent" with previous years' counts going back to 2019, according to the Malware Lab's State of Ransomware in the US"The fact that there seems not to have been any decrease in the number of incidents is concerning," the authors wrote, citing various