(The Hill) – The Division of Well being and Human Companies (HHS) warned on Monday that pro-Russian hacktivist group Killnet is actively focusing on the U.S. healthcare trade with distributed denial of service (DDoS) assaults.
HHS stated in a discover that the group has been going after international locations supporting Ukraine, together with NATO members.
“Though KillNet’s ties to official Russian authorities organizations such because the Russian Federal Safety Service (FSB) or the Russian International Intelligence Service (SVR) are unconfirmed, the group must be thought of a risk to authorities and significant infrastructure organizations together with healthcare,” HHS stated.
The division added that though the DDoS assaults don’t trigger main harm, “they’ll trigger service outages lasting a number of hours or days.”
DDoS assaults, that are thought of low-level sorts of cyberattacks, are usually used to disrupt and overwhelm a server with web visitors, inflicting it to close down.
HHS cited a number of cases the place Killnet focused organizations within the healthcare sector, together with one final yr the place the division stated the group hacked a U.S.-based healthcare group that helps U.S. army members and stole a big set of consumer information from the corporate.
The healthcare sector has been significantly susceptible to a rise in ransomware assaults lately, because it shops delicate info, together with affected person information, medical analysis, and know-how.
In response to the rising cyber threats focusing on the healthcare sector, lawmakers have launched laws and suggestions to guard the trade and mitigate the affect.
Killnet additionally reportedly focused the aviation trade final yr. The group claimed duty for launching a collection of cyberattacks geared toward greater than a dozen web sites of main U.S. airports, together with the Atlanta and Los Angeles worldwide airports.
Killnet moreover claimed duty for knocking a number of U.S. state authorities web sites offline, together with in Colorado, Mississippi and Kentucky, a month earlier than the 2022 midterm election.
