A ransomware attack launched on the database of the California National Veterinary Associates(NVA) is said to have impacted more than 700 veterinary hospital networks and animal boarding facilities in United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Highly placed sources say that NVA came to know about the cyber incident on Oct 27th this year when security analysts from KrebsOnSecurity and one other firm investigated the matter and remediated the attack.
RYUK ransomware is said to have hit the database. But an official confirmation is awaited!
Details on whether a ransom was paid to decrypt the database is yet to be known.
Laura Koester, the Chief Marketing Officer of NVA has confirmed the incident. But declined to comment on a further note on whether a ransom was paid to hackers. She, however, said that no major IT casualty was reported and all the hospitals in the network remained open and were able to see the clients.
Koester said that only 5% of animal welfare networks were affected by the incident as they could not process online appointments to some patients. But the impact was felt digitally and was never pushed onto the animals as all sick patients were attended and treated accordingly without any digital validation.
Robert Hill, the director of operations NVA issued a press statement yesterday that the monumental operation of restoring the IT service was underway from Oct 30 and almost 40% of data was recovered on a perfect note.
Greg Hartman, the head of technology of NVA said that the ransomware blocked the infiltration for the first time. But the second attack went unnoticed and so the impact was felt a bit.
Note- A similar ransomware attack took place on the servers of NVA earlier this year and RYUK ransomware was found to be the culprit behind the incident at that time.
