Today, one of Australian’s largest prescription companies finds itself at the center of a ransomware attack, with millions of potentially hacked and stolen personal information.
MediSecure is one of Australian’s paperless digital script prescription (an electronic prescription) companies. Although the Australian Government switched their business to focus on eRx, another digital prescription company, MediSecure systems are still available for old patients to access old documents.
And while that may not mean that digital IDs have been breached, there’s still a lot of personal information to be stolen from the attack.
Given that their systems were put on ransom less than 48 hours ago, they’re being vague about the severity of the attack. But to get a rough idea of how large-scale it actually is: between 2020-2023, 122 million digital scripts were issued. That’s a lot of prescriptions…
Unfortunately, with how some ransomware attacks work, we won’t know the outcome until MediSecure announces it. Sometimes, as long as the company pays the ransom, everything is fine and dandy. Other times, they pay the ransom and the data is still stolen. Talk about honor amongst thieves.
In the smaller picture, every Australian organization is assisting in dealing with this ransomware breach: Australian Federal Police, the Cybersecurity Minister, the official Australian Cybersecurity center, etc…
In the bigger picture, it may not be so wise to have a continent-wide digital ID system that allows hackers to have all your information if stolen.
Clear-Cut Definitions
Ransomware: A software that hacks into systems and holds the information on that system hostage, in return for repayment. Typically, once payment is provided, the system’s information is provided again.