Hospitals ask cloud storage company to hand over stolen data hosted on its servers

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Two hospitals take legal action over data found on cloud storage servers

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Two hospitals that suffered ransomware attacks have discovered their data is being stored by a cloud storage provider.

The hospitals are now asking the courts to force Wasabi Technologies to hand over the stolen information, so that they can look to verify exactly what data was taken.

The cloud storage firm has already provided copies of the data to the FBI to aid the investigation, but the hospitals are now pursuing a court order that will force Wasabi to return the data to its original owners.

Not the first hospitals to be targeted

The two hospitals based in New York operate on a not-for-profit model and founded the North Star Health Alliance which provides healthcare to 220,000 people in the northern New York area.

Carthage Area Hospital and Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center suffered attacks by LockBit, a ransomware gang who have targeted a number of hospitals in the US and Europe over the holiday period, causing chaos, diverting patients and requiring a large amount of care rescheduling.

As part of an investigation into the stolen data, the hospitals discovered information relating to the stolen data stored on the servers of a cloud storage platform run by Wasabi Technologies.

Speaking to 7News, North Star Health Alliance CEO Richard Duvall said, “So the best option explored by our legal team and working with the FBI is actually going after that company to get our secluded data so that we can be sure what information was leaked.”

The LockBit gang has been operating a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) since as early as 2019 which has been used to target a wide range of victims on an international scale, with estimates suggesting that since 2020, at least $91 million has been stolen from U.S. based organizations.

In a statement to TechRadar Pro, the company said "Wasabi is committed to complying with all relevant regulatory requests. It is our policy not to comment on ongoing legal matters."

Via BleepingComputer

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Benedict Collins
Benedict Collins
Staff Writer (Security)

Benedict has been writing about security issues for close to 5 years, at first covering geopolitics and international relations while at the University of Buckingham. During this time he studied BA Politics with Journalism, for which he received a second-class honours (upper division). Benedict then continued his studies at a postgraduate level and achieved a distinction in MA Security, Intelligence and Diplomacy. Benedict transitioned his security interests towards cybersecurity upon joining TechRadar Pro as a Staff Writer, focussing on state-sponsored threat actors, malware, social engineering, and national security. Benedict is also an expert on B2B security products, including firewalls, antivirus, endpoint security, and password management.