Blood donation giant warns of issues following ransomware attack

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New York Blood Center announces it was hit by a ransomware attack
It has notified the police, but said its operations were hindered
No details about the attackers or the consequences just yet

One of the largest independent, community-based blood centers in the world has suffered a ransomware attack which crippled its operations.

In a public announcement, the New York Blood Center (NYBC) said it was working on restoring its systems, and had notified police about the attack.

“On Sunday, January 26, New York Blood Center Enterprises and its operating divisions identified suspicious activity affecting our IT systems. We immediately engaged third-party cybersecurity experts to investigate and confirmed that the suspicious activity is a result of a ransomware incident,” the announcement reads. “We took immediate steps to help contain the threat and are working diligently with these experts to restore our systems as quickly and as safely as possible.”

Blood firms in the crosshairs

Other details are not known at this time. We don’t know who the threat actors are, or how they managed to access NYBC’s IT infrastructure. Since ransomware attackers usually steal sensitive information, it is safe to assume the same happened here. However, we don’t know how many people are affected, or what kind of information might have been stolen.

NYBC serves over 75 million people across the United States. Annually, it collects approximately 400,000 blood donations and distributes more than 1 million units of blood and blood components to nearly 200 hospitals. Therefore, the number of potentially affected people could be quite large, and the information stolen could be sensitive.

Blood donation firms seem to be in the crosshairs these days. Earlier this month, news broke that OneBlood, a nonprofit medical organization crucial for the operations of healthcare firms across the Southeastern US, lost sensitive donor information in a ransomware attack that happened last summer.

The move disrupted services across multiple US states, with the organization operating at a ‘significantly reduced capacity’.

Blood donation firm reveals donor personal data stolen in cyberattack
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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.