FBI probing ransom attack on UCSF data
The FBI is investigating a cyberattack that led UCSF to pay approximately $1.14 million in ransom so the hackers would unlock data illegally obtained from the school, officials said Tuesday.
The university’s IT staff detected the incident June 1 as it was taking place “in a limited part of the UCSF School of Medicine’s IT environment,” school officials said in a statement. Staffers were able to isolate the incident from the core UCSF network.
School officials said they don’t believe patient medical records were exposed, and the school’s patient care delivery operations, as well as the overall campus network and efforts related to the coronavirus outbreak, were not affected.
The school said it was limited in the information it could share as the incident remained
under investigation.
“As additional facts become known, we will provide further updates,” officials said.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The individuals who staged the attack “launched malware that encrypted a limited number of servers within the School of Medicine, making them temporarily inaccessible,” UCSF officials said. The school does not believe a particular area was targeted.
“The data that was encrypted is important to some of the academic work we pursue as a university serving the public good,” officials wrote in a statement. “We therefore made the difficult decision to pay some portion of the ransom, approximately $1.14 million, to the individuals behind the malware attack in exchange for a tool to unlock the encrypted data and the return of the data they obtained.”
Federal authorities warned in April that cyberattacks attempting to exploit virtual environments were expected as the coronavirus pandemic has increased the use of virtual tools among government agencies, as well as private organizations and individuals.
UCSF officials said the attack reflected “the growing use of malware by cybercriminals around the world seeking monetary gain, including several recent attacks on institutions of higher education.”