The Petya Global Malware Incident Hitting Nuance, Merck, and Many Others

The Petya Malware (or NotPetya or ExPetya) has really hit healthcare in a big way. The biggest impact on the healthcare IT world was the damage it caused to Nuance, but it also hit Merck and some other healthcare systems. After a shaky start to their communication strategy, Nuance seems to finally at least be updating their customers who saw a lot of downtime from when it first started on June 28 until now. This rogue Nuance employee account has been pretty interesting to watch as well. There’s a lesson there about corporate social media policies during a crisis.

Petya was originally classified as ransomware, but experts are now suggesting that it’s not ransomware since it has no way to recover from the damage it’s doing. It’s amazing to think how pernicious a piece of malware is that just destroys whatever it can access. That’s pretty scary as a CIO and it’s no surprise that Petya, WannaCry, and other malware/ransomware is making CIOs “cry.”

It’s been eye opening to see how many healthcare organizations have depended on Nuance’s services and quite frankly the vast number of services they offer healthcare. It’s been extremely damaging for many healthcare organizations and has them rethinking their cloud strategy and even leaving Nuance for competitors like MModal. I’m surprised MModal’s social team hasn’t at least tweeted something about their services still being available online and not affected by Petya.

I’ll be interested to see how this impacts Nuance’s business. Nuance is giving away free versions of their Dragon Medical voice recognition software to customers who can’t use Nuance’s transcription business. Long term I wonder if this will actually help Nuance convert more customers from transcription to voice recognition. In the past 5 days, Nuance’s stock price has droppped $1.54 per share. Considering the lack of effective alternatives and the near monopoly they have in many areas, I’ll be surprised if their business is severely damaged.

As I do with most ransomware and malware incidents, I try not to be too harsh on those experiencing these incidents. The reality is that it can and will happen to all of us. It’s just a question of when and how hard we’ll be hit. It’s the new reality of this hyper connected world. Adding to the intrigue of Petya is that it seems to have been targeted mostly at the Ukraine and companies like Nuance and Merck were just collateral damage. Yet, what damage it’s done.

Earlier today David Chou offered some suggestions on how to prevent ransomware attacks that are worth considering at every organization. The one that stands out most to me with these most recent attacks is proper backups. Here is my simple 3 keys to effective backups:

Layers – Given all the various forms of ransomware, malware, natural disasters, etc, it’s important that you incorporate layers of backups. A real time backup of your systems is great until it replicates the malware in real time to your backup server. Then you’re up a creek without a paddle. An off site backup is great until your off site location has an issue. You need to have layers of backup that take into account all of the ways your data could go bad, be compromised, etc.

Simple – This may seem like a contradiction to the first point, but it’s not. You can have layers of backups and still keep the approach simple and straightforward. Far too often I see organizations with complex backup schemes which are impossible to monitor and therefore stop working effectively. The KISS principle is a good one with backups. If you make it too complex then you’ll never realize that it’s actually failing on you. There’s nothing worse than a failed backup when you think it’s running fine.

Test – If you’ve never tested your backups by actually restoring them, then you’re playing russian roulette with your data. It’s well known that many backups complete without actually backing up the data properly. The only way to know if your backup really worked is to do a test restore of the data. Make sure you have regularly scheduled tests that actually restore your data to a backup server. Otherwise, don’t be surprised if and when your backup doesn’t restore properly when it’s really needed. Malware events are stressful enough. Knowing you have a good backup that can be restored can soften the blow.

Backups won’t solve all of your problems related to malware, but it’s one extremely important step in the process and a great place to start. Now I’m going to go and run some backups on my own systems and test the restore.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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