The Hackers Ransom - Virginia Medical Records

The Register is reporting an interesting story on a hacker or hackers demanding $10 million as a ransom of Virginia medical data from the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program. Unsurprising all enquiries are be routed to the director of the Virginia Department of Health Professionals, who is presently unavailable.

According to The Register the hacker/s posted on Wikileaks that they have 8257378 patient records and a total of 35548087 prescriptions, and moree insight into other references, but you can read that there.

This is fairly interesting as you have to imagine authorities in the States would have a no ransom policy with data seeing as they do with hostages, etc. What will they do if they cannot find the hacker? That becomes the quandry, allow all those records to be made public? Ironicallly, the hacker clains to have deleted Viriginia's original data and their back up! Oh goodness...

This could be a conundrum. It would be interesting to see the authorities not catch this/these person/s to see how the system worked or did not work (not advocating crime. They could not do that though, could they? Allow 8.2 million peoples' personal records be sold to the highest bidder? Well luckily for the authorities, that is what they intend to do. The authorities in that case, may see that as blessing if they cannot catch this hacker and they sell the personal data and perscriptions information to some marketing, health insurnance or pharmacetical firm, not that any of them would ever buy anything like that.

That is definitely a more acceptable outcome than the hacker publishing the data online for anyone and everyone to copy and then sell on.

This is a shocking example of how privacy is a thing of the past, even confidential medical records are at risk now. I guess the only way to ensure that your data does not get distributed for profit, is to not have any data in any system. That is not going to happen if you live in a developed (or dveloping) country for that matter. The truth is that nothing is safe anymore, our lives are just going to get filled with more spam and more advertising.

All systems can eventually be hacked along a long enough timeline, I guess it is just a matter of time before ours are, assuming they have not been already.

So this is not necessarily an interesting case yet... If they catch the person, it will not be either, but if they don't, it is definitely one to watch unfold.

But this does not change the fact that this is quite possibly the world's stupidiest hacker! :)