Ransomware Attack At Hospital in Wyoming
No one is safe from data breaches, not even hospitals. A ransomware attack at the Campbell County Memorial Hospital in Gillette, Wyoming happened last Friday morning. This small-town trauma hospital had to send its patients more than 125 miles away from town to another hospital so they could be treated.
Not only do businesses and large companies get hit with data breaches, even a small-town hospital can be a victim to them. The ransomware attack made it impossible for the hospital with only 90 beds to treat any of its patients. Ransomware is when someone sends a file or link that when clicked takes hold of the computer and makes you pay a fee to “unlock” it. Some popular ransomware includes the FBI virus, where it claims the FBI has been watching you and caught you doing something illegal. In order to get your PC unlocked you have to wire money to the “FBI” for release.
This, of course, is a fake “FBI” warning, and its goal is to steal your money from you by making you funnel it to the hacker so you can get your PC unlocked. Will it actually unlock your PC? Doubtful. Even if it did, you would have to pay a lot of money to get it unlocked by “the FBI,” and it would end up still being on your PC. Which means they could get you any time. You would need a professional computer technician to remove this virus.
With even a hospital being subjected to this kind of virus, it makes you feel like no one is safe from getting hacked. And you would be right; data breaches happen to anyone, regardless of company or its services provided. Hospitals and even the government can get hacked and have their information stolen.
Not only has this small-town hospital been attacked, other hospitals in the past have had ransomware attacks as well, such as the large 2016 hack on Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in California and the Medstar Health system that serves Maryland and Washington.
How Do I Prevent This?
What does this mean for you? How can you prevent your information from being stolen in a data breach? Well, you can try and prevent it from happening to your PC by securing it, but if your data is with any other company, hospital, business, bank, etc. your data may be exposed during a data breach.
So essentially, there is nothing you can really do to prevent your information from being stolen from a third-party during a data breach. Getting a good cybersecurity program will be useful for your data on your home PC, but otherwise elsewhere you do not have many options. The only thing you can really do is to take measures for when your data gets stolen.
This can include not giving out your information to many places online, and if any information is already out there, you should get it removed ASAP. Now, this might sound like a difficult thing to do, and it is. It is not only time consuming; it will not account for new information popping back up.
If you google yourself, you will find that your information is readily available on the web for all to see. All they need is one piece of information about you, and they can find you. This may be scary, and it really is, but there is a way to get your personal data removed from the internet.
How Do I Remove My Data?
Getting your data removed by yourself can take forever and will not be 100% successful. This can be a pain for you if you are trying to get rid of your electronic footprint. But there are ways around this; using a company that does this for you and monitors your data for anything new popping up is the way to go.
But who does this service? Wiperts.com does! They can be very useful in removing the personal data you want to be removed and keeping an eye out for any of your information that is new pops up. Say they remove all the data you want to have removed. Well a few days later, your name comes up on a website you did not sign up for. What does Wiperts do? They get notified that it is online again, and they take measures to get it removed. This can be very useful in keeping your identity safe and removing any unwanted information about yourself that can be found online.
Conclusion
Data breaches happen every day anywhere, but you can try and stay safe by having Wiperts.com remove your online data and monitor it for future removal. This is the best way you can remain safe, along with making sure your passwords are unique (no password123) and secure. Stay safe out there!
