British Dental Association(BDA), a trade union organization for registered dentists in United Kingdom has released a press update on its website that it became a victim of a sophisticated cyber attack on July 30th, 2020 and as a precautionary measure took all of its systems offline.
Highly placed sources say that a portion of data was also accessed and exfiltrated by hackers in the cyber attack. However, a detailed investigation is yet to be conducted and final details can only be obtained after the completion.
Security researchers say that the incident could be of a ransomware genre as the association has been barred from accessing the data after the attack and a portion of data was sent to remote servers that is a strong trait of Maze or Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware groups.
Note 1- A similar ransomware attack that took place on a dental clinic in Toronto in Oct’2019 was asked to pay a ransom of $165,000 to free up the files from the file encrypting malware named ‘Ryuk’.
Note 2- In November last week of 2019, a Sodinokibi ransomware attack took place on a database of a dental chain of hospitals locking doctors from accessing data.
Note 3- As the cases of ransomware attacks increased in the past two years, FBI issued a press statement in Nov’19 that victims shouldn’t pay any ransom to the hackers as it encourages cyber crime and doesn’t guaranty a decryption key in exchange. However, in cases, where recovery of data is not possible through backups, then FBI has urged victimized organizations to act according to the situation.
