cybercriminals favorable to Russia of Vladimir Putin have attacked at least four Catalan hospitals in the last few months. According to what the newspaper announced this Sunday now and EL PERIÓDICO has been able to confirm, this avalanche of computer attacks began on January 28 and went to the Trueta Hospital in Girona and the Vall d’Hebron, Sant Pau and Clínic hospitals in Barcelona.
On that occasion, the attackers resorted to the distributed denial of service (DDoS), a method based on the coordinated generation of a large flow of information to the attacked servers with the intention of saturating and overloading them so that they do not work. The Cybersecurity Agency of Catalonia has confirmed to this newspaper that these assaults had a “specific” affectation and were neutralized by their defense systems.
behind this campaign cyber attacks is KillNet, a cybercriminal group linked to the Kremlin and specialized in perpetrating all kinds of attacks against companies as strategic institutions of the countries of the NATO, from airports to military manufacturers. This network has been active since January of last year and its activity has accelerated after the Russian invasion of Ukraine as part of unconventional warfare. Last November, without going any further, he managed to paralyze the European Parliament website after it declared Russia a terrorist state. Other pro-Putin groups such as Infinity Hackers By and the Russian branch of anonymous.
“International Threat”
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Hospitals are an increasingly common critical target among cybercriminals, as their high impact on citizens is used as an extortion mechanism. Health centers in Catalonia are only part of what the Agència de Ciberseguretat calls an “international threat”. Spanish hospitals such as Vigo or Santander also appear on the target list of Moscow-related hackers. During the same days, KillNet tried to attack dozens of hospitals in countries such as the United States, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom or the Netherlands.
The Agència de Ciberseguretat has not found “any relationship” between this wave of failed cyberattacks that targeted the Hospital Clinic and the kidnapping of data perpetrated on March 5 that has forced the medical center to paralyze much of its activity. This time, the pirates ransomhouse have blocked the center’s access to crucial information and now require the Generalitat to pay a rescue $4.5 million to free them, an extortion method known as ‘ransomware‘. The Catalan authorities have assured that they will not negotiate “not one cent” and continue working on the recovery of hospital services. Investigation sources told EL PERIÓDICO that the attackers could have accessed cutting-edge research on diseases such as cancer, as well as tax data on both employees and patients at the center.